Asteroid Zoo Talk

eye senstivity

  • powrslave by powrslave

    How sensitive should we be in evaluating some of these potential objects? I get that asteroids can be pretty obvious in terms of brightness and linear movement but sometimes there's structure to the grain, where you think a tiny grainule looks like it could be moving along a path... Should we flag all those potential false positives as well? How sensitive should we be?
    Thanks!
    Eli

    Posted

  • Khono by Khono

    I also wonder about this. Many times I've found two frames where dots which could be noise seem to follow a path. Sometimes there will be more multiple apparent paths, again, usually with only two frames.

    All of the known, obvious asteroids I've seen move very slowly across the screen. Should we ignore patterns which move much faster?

    Posted

  • Emili_Sancha by Emili_Sancha

    Each frame has a different sensitivity. The are photographed with diferen filters. Some asteroids may not be really impressed in each frame due to its low magnitude.

    Posted

  • scibuff by scibuff

    Yes, those can be the hardest to distinguish even for the human eye. Just remember even a very faint asteroid

    1. will NOT be just 1-2 pixels across (those are hot pixels)
    2. will still have star-like look, e.g. brighter in the center and a bit dimmer at the edges
    3. the movement WILL be linear, e.g. not only the direction but also the "steps" will be equal
    4. if you have several "objects" moving in the same direction with the same apparent speed, and they are 50-50 appearance wise between real and artifact, it is far more likely they are all artifact, than several objects like that in a rather small field of view - furthermore, after a bit you'll notice that the artifacts tend to move in the same direction with the same speed across all quads of images, not just a single instance

    Posted