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M. Hicks, R. Bambery, K. Lawrence (JPL/Caltech)
The Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) Program at the Jet Propulsion laboratory remotely operates two autonomous 1.2-meter telescopes at widely geographically separated locations on a near-nightly basis. Though optimized for the discovery of near-Earth asteroids, we have collected over 400 CCD images of approximately 50 short and long-period comets over the last 25 months. Using the R-band magnitudes as archived in the USNO catalog of background field stars, we are able to derive photometrically calibrations accurate to approximately ±0.1 mag over a wide range of seeing and sky transparency.
The NEAT archive represents a large, self-consistent cometary data-set which we have used to explore activity as a function of heliocentric distance, dust production (Afrho), cometary dust trails, etc. We have modeled the coma contamination for comets at large heliocentric distance (>3 AU) and have obtained upper limits for nuclear magnitudes and constraints to the cometary size-frequency distribution.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 35 #4
© 2003. The American Astronomical Soceity.