I was trying to figure out how to successfully find the QSO in Vizier and then I noticed these several of these multicolored things. I don’t which website allows me to see which asteroids these are, or if they’re even asteroids.
Yes, those colorful “beach-ball” objects are asteroids in SDSS. The SDSS camera was a drift-scan camera, some r-i-u-z-g images were taken about a minute apart; the asteroids move in that time. These color images are made from i,r,g = RGB, so from the orientation and ordering you can tell the projected velocity of the asteroid.
Cool! Is there a way I can get the date so I can find out which asteroids they are in Minor Planet Checker?
Nevermind, I found them in VizieR catalogs. The bright one is called (476621) 2008 SP162.
Definitely something weird going on in that frame! Definitely an artifact, though not a kind I have seen before!
To the right is more similar stuff like this!
https://www.legacysurvey.org//viewer/?ra=17.7576&dec=13.4899&layer=sdss&zoom=13
|UCAC4 467-001080 – Star|
It could be a star, and if it’s an asteroid, there’s a slightly distorted emission of light nearby.
Smear phenomenon is a phenomenon in which vertical lines appear when a certain part of a CCD camera receives excessive light. It occurs due to the characteristics of the CCD image sensor, and it mainly appears on the display, but does not affect the captured image.
→ But if you look at that, um… from my subjective point of view, it is likely a comet or an asteroid!
The original post was about these objects:
which are how asteroids appear in SDSS images because of their observing setup.
The SDSS (and more visibly the Legacy Surveys) images do also show this smear (which we call “bleed trails”); the SDSS pipeline tries to patch over them, leaving artifacts like this
In LS they look like this instead
cheers,
dustin
It’s definitely a nearby star. UCAC4 467-001080 is in several stellar catalogs, and Gaia’s probability for it being a star is greater than 99%. Despite the high parallax, it doesn’t appear to move as much.
It’s certainly 100% for a star. It has pretty characteristic features including parallax and proper motion.
