Observing at Sutherland, December 2014
I applied for a week of time on the 1-meter telescope at Sutherland, South
Africa. This isn't a large telescope by today's standards, but it's enough to
measure the brightness of tiny rocks far from the Earth. I went out with my
Honours physics student, Dan Morris, for a week in December 2014. We used it to
take light-curves of a handful of Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) that were close,
bright, and unstudied. We had great weather, which usually meant that I would
have been at the telescope observing... but thanks to having him there, I was
able to take some night-time photos as well.
This work was funded by NASA, and was done in collaboration with Vishnu
Reddy (also at PSI).
This was my third trip to Sutherland since we've been in South Africa, and the
first trip where I didn't get snowed on... check out the photos from my other observing trips.