Asteroid Zoo Talk

Lean spells

  • rob_t by rob_t

    What is the average amount of images one has to go thru before coming across an asteroid?
    I am going thru dozens of images, looking v carefully, before I come to a moving object.......

    Posted

  • grums by grums

    There seems little guidance as to what may constitute an asteroid compared with a sequence of random noise. I wrote something on how to classify asteroids to try to get some consistancy (see classifying asteroid observations) and to suggest a scheme for people to describe where the asteroid is. I think some people only find bright and obvious ones (and miss others) and other people mistake noise sequences and artifacts for asteroids. I have passed through both these extremes 😃. I only thought of doing this after going through around 1000 image sets. My guess is that only between 2% and 5% of image sets has an asteroid that can be identified. I classified the identifications that I do as A to F but, in the absence of feedback, I cannot be sure of which are real hits, although I have found the asteroids in the vast majority of the sets which turn out to have known asteroids in them. At a guess I would say that the chance of the A to F classifications being an asteroid are A=95%, B=90%, C=80%, D=50%, E=20%, F=10%. E and F could even be worse as there is a lot of "interpretation" of the image required.

    Some image sets are poor for various reasons and can be dismissed quickly and others take a lot of searching. I have not timed myself but I would guess I take anything between 20 seconds (on a badset that has insufficient frames) to 10 minutes on a "difficult" image. I think, with some feedback, it would be possible to optimise the use of searchers' time as finding the dubious E and F classes take the longest time and may turn out to be not cost effective to search that hard for such a low reward (it may well be much less than my guesses of 20% and 10%).

    Posted

  • Dr.Asteroid by Dr.Asteroid scientist, admin

    Actually, we're also doing the interface that way because I'm not 100% certain that I have the perfect way to do this. You each are slightly different - and that's actually really important so we can understand what is the best option - without trying to teach you the wrong way. (just because I'd have a way to do this - but you might have a better way)

    Posted