Saturday, August 28, 2010

Asteroid Discovery Video

Check out this cool video by Scott Manley of asteroids as they are discovered from 1980 to the present time. Many thousands of the ones shown here were discovered at Palomar Observatory (and lots of other places too).


Check out the full resolution version here at YouTube. You can get the full text there, but note that most of asteroids are discovered in the opposite direction of the sun. That is until the very end when a new set of discoveries shows up, those asteroids discovered by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer.

1 comment:

Charles Bell said...

Thanks for that observation about the space based discoveries near the end of the video. That must be C51 WISE. I was wondering about that.
The opposition effect explains most of the rest.