D. Polishook, E. O. Ofek, A. Waszczak, S. R. Kulkarni, A. Gal-Yam, O. Aharonson, R. Laher, J. Surace, C. Klein, J. Bloom, N. Brosch, D. Prialnik, C. Grillmair, S. B. Cenko, M. Kasliwal, N. Law, D. Levitan, P. Nugent, D. Poznanski, R. Quimby
The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) is a synoptic survey designed to explore
the transient and variable sky in a wide variety of cadences. We use PTF
observations of fields that were observed multiple times (>=10) per night, for
several nights, to find asteroids, construct their lightcurves and measure
their rotation periods. Here we describe the pipeline we use to achieve these
goals and present the results from the first four (overlapping) PTF fields
analyzed as part of this program. These fields, which cover an area of 21
deg^2, were observed on four nights with a cadence of ~20 min. Our pipeline was
able to detect 624 asteroids, of which 145 (~20%) were previously unknown. We
present high quality rotation periods for 88 main-belt asteroids and possible
period or lower limit on the period for an additional 85 asteroids. For the
remaining 451 asteroids, we present lower limits on their photometric
amplitudes. Three of the asteroids have lightcurves that are characteristic of
binary asteroids. We estimate that implementing our search for all existing
high-cadence PTF data will provide rotation periods for about 10,000 asteroids
mainly in the magnitude range ~14 to ~20.
View original:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.1930
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