The Jarnac Comet Survey (JCS) is the result of a fruitful collaboration between the extremely successful traditional comet discoverers David and Wendee Levy and Carolyn Shoemaker, and new automation and detector technology and techniques as well as scientific insight provided by Carol Neese and Gilbert Esquerdo of the Planetary Science Institute.

The population of comets that inhabit the solar system, particularly the smaller members, is poorly understood. By optimizing our survey for the detection of small, faint comets, we hope to extend our knowledge of the comet population to smaller sizes. Details on our science goals may be found in a link under that name on the main page.

While the current workhorse of the Jarnac Comet Survey is the 0.3-m f/2.2 Schmidt camera, we are beginning to transition to a fully electronic, fully automated survey. We have chosen to incorporate commercially produced components to reduce costs as well as development time. Currently, a 0.2-m system operating at f/4.35 has been the primary automation testbed system. We have successfully operated in automated mode since February of 2001. More advanced scriptwriting has allowed the system to run without operator intervention throughout the night. This technology will be applied to the next generation of instruments we bring on line.

Moving object detection is accomplished through a commercially produced software package that scans the three images taken of each field and looks for objects that are displaced from one image to the next. Accurate positions are derived for each detection and these positions are then compiled into a format suitable for submission to the Minor Planet Center.

The only human intervention for the automated survey will be the writing of each nights script of observations, transfer of this file to the telescope via the internet. At the end of each night, the raw data will be processed in a batch mode and then analyzed by the moving object detection code. The candidate detecions are then manually inspected by an operator to check for any false detections that may have fooled the detection code, as well as to provide a means by which to determine what objects show cometary properties.

Back to the JCS Homepage.