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K. J. Lawrence, S. H. Pravdo, D. L. Rabinowitz, E. F. Helin (JPL), T. A. McGlynn (GSFC), F. P. Seelos IV (Wofford College/CalTech SURF)
In conjunction with JPL's Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT)program (see submitted Helin et al abstract), SkyMorph is an archive of NEAT observational images available for public access via the World Wide Web. SkyMorph covers much of the sky with emphasis along the ecliptic plane. Motion and brightness changes can be detected because each area of the sky is reobserved at different timescales (half-hourly, daily, yearly). As a result, one can detect asteroids, comets, high-proper motion stars, novae, and supernovae to name a few. Upon viewing the data, SkyMorph includes the RA and Dec of all detected objects, their magnitudes and lightcurves. Currently, SkyMorph contains 75 nights of data consisting of over 29,500 images and covering nearly 74,000 sq. deg. The majority of the images are obtained with the 4096 x 4096 NEAT CCD camera mounted on a U. S. Air Force 1 meter telescope on Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii. Each image is 2.6 sq. deg. (1.6 deg. on each side) and is 33.3 Mb in size. NEAT has observed monthly since December 1995 with 213 nights of observations. As NEAT observations continue, the SkyMorph database will be updated. The unprocessed nights of data are being added at a rate of one night per day. HAVANA (the Horizons Assisted Vehicle for Accessing the NEAT Archive) is a newly deployed software package that enables automated searches for specific asteroids through the extensive Skymorph database. Utilizing the JPL on-line ephemeris program, Horizons, to generate an orbit for the user's object of interest, HAVANA compares the position of the object in space and time with all the archived image fields and retrieves sub-images from each field containing the object. It can be used to find archival observations of well-known objects or pre-discovery detections of newly discovered objects. SkyMorph is accessible through the World Wide Web at the following URL address: http://skys.gsfc.nasa.gov/skymorph/obs.html. It is sponsored by NASA Code SR's Applied Information System Research program.
If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://skys.gsfc.nasa.gov/skymorph/obs.html. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.