Lowell Observatory Near-Earth-Object Search

Lowell Observatory Near-Earth-Object Search (LONEOS) was a project designed to discover asteroids and comets that orbit near the Earth. The project, funded by NASA, was directed by Dr. Ted Bowell of Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. The LONEOS project began in 1993 and ran until the end of February 2008.

LONEOS, in its final configuration, used a 0.6-meter f/1.8 Schmidt telescope, acquired from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1990, and a Lowell-built 16 megapixel CCD detector. This combination of instruments provided a field of view of 2.88 by 2.88 degrees (8.3 square degrees). It had a maximum nightly scan area of about 1,000 square degrees (covered four times). The instrument could cover the entire accessible dark sky in about a month. The CCD has detected asteroids as faint as visual magnitude 19.8 but its typical limiting visual magnitude was 19.3. The instrument is located at Lowell Observatory's dark sky site, Anderson Mesa Station, near Flagstaff, Arizona, USA.

Four computers were used. Two were used for frame reductions, one for telescope pointing control and one for camera control. The camera control software had scripting capability and could control all the other computers.

Asteroids were found by obtaining four pictures (frames) of the same region of sky, each frame temporally separated by 15 to 30 minutes. The set of four frames were then submitted to reduction software which located all star-like sources on the frame and identified sources that moved with asteroid-like motion. The observer visually examined all asteroid detections that had motion different from a typical main-belt asteroid. Human examination was required because most putative NEO detections were not real but some kind of imaging artifact.

All asteroid positions were converted to equatorial coordinates. Various USNO star catalogs were used for this conversion until 2007. Then the Sloan Digital Sky Survey catalog was used, along with supplemental information from the Carlsberg Catalog and the 2MASS catalog. Asteroid brightness was converted to standard visual magnitude. These data, along with the time of the observations, were sent to the Minor Planet Center (MPC) from which they were distributed to the scientific community. Potential near-Earth objects were handled expeditiously so that other observers could locate the asteroid on the same night and make further observations.

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