This project will no longer be updated, and results will no longer be generated after the already-submitted batches are investigated. The Zooniverse version of the project is shutting down - we are moving to our own website.
If you wish to continue identifying asteroid with the help of Asteroid Connect, head over to https://arda-guler.github.io/AsteroidConnect/
The Team
Hi there! We are amateur astronomers who are interested in minor planet astronomy. Yes - this is a citizen science project by citizen scientists! Of course the results of this project will have to go through the professional filters of the Minor Planet Center, so you can be sure that we are going to be handling real data for real research.
Team Members
@06r2d206 (H. A. Guler) is an amateur astronomer from Turkey who is especially interested in celestial dynamics - that is, orbit prediction and determination. He has first met the world of citizen astronomy by contributing to the first installment of Galaxy Zoo and joining BOINC projects such as SETI@Home and Asteroids@Home among many others. He has taken part in several Zooniverse projects since. When it comes to minor planets, The Daily Minor Planet and COIAS has been important inspirations. He eventually created the software that powers Asteroid Connect, called "Connectonomicon".
@InoSenpai is an amateur astronomer in Japan. He discovered the world of citizen science at COIAS, where he met aglr (@06r2d206), and joined Zooniverse after learning about the Daily Minor Planet, a citizen science project similar to COIAS that aims to discover asteroids. Since then, he has become a Japanese translator for about 20 space-related Zooniverse projects and educates the Japanese astronomy enthusiast community, which is still not very familiar with Zooniverse. His account handle-name “InoSenpai” comes from the character “KOIAS - Asteroid in Love”, a manga about a high school student who dreams of discovering an asteroid.
Acknowledgements
This research makes use of data and/or services provided by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center.
Connectonomicon, the software we built to generate and check the charts, makes use of Bill Gray's find_orb orbit fitting software. You can learn more about it (and more astronomy tools) in the Project Pluto website.
In addition, many of the observations currently used in the data set were measured by volunteer users of COIAS, a citizen science project (not hosted on Zooniverse) to search for asteroids in the archival footage of Subaru Telescope's Hyper Suprime Cam.
(We are not affiliated with the IAU or the MPC, or the COIAS development team.)
