Asteroid Photometry with PIRATE: Optimizations and Techniques for Small Aperture Telescopes

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated pipeline for asteroid photometry using small aperture telescopes, enabling high-frequency observations and phase curve construction, with demonstrated improvements in data quality and practical application to near-Earth asteroids.

Contribution

The authors developed an optimized, automated photometry pipeline for small telescopes, enhancing data quality and enabling detailed asteroid phase curve observations.

Findings

Successful extraction of asteroid light curves from PIRATE data.

Improved photometric calibration techniques for small aperture telescopes.

Construction of phase curves for specific near-Earth asteroids.

Abstract

Small aperture telescopes provide the opportunity to conduct high frequency, targeted observations of near-Earth Asteroids that are not feasible with larger facilities due to highly competitive time allocation requirements. Observations of asteroids with these types of facilities often focus on rotational brightness variations rather than longer-term phase angle dependent variations (phase curves) due to the difficulty of achieving high precision photometric calibration. We have developed an automated asteroid light curve extraction and calibration pipeline for images of moving objects from the 0.43 m Physics Innovations Robotic Telescope Explorer (PIRATE). This allows for the frequency and quality of observations required to construct asteroid phase curves. Optimisations in standard data reduction procedures are identified that may allow for similar small aperture facilities, constructed from commercially available/off-the-shelf components, to improve image and subsequent data quality. A demonstration of the hardware and software capabilities is expressed through observation statistics from a 10 month observing campaign, and through the photometric characterisation of near-Earth Asteroids 8014 (1990 MF) and 19764 (2000 NF5).