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Tuscon-based amateur asteroid hunter Roy Tucker has announced his latest discoveries and an ingenious new telescope design at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in Albuquerque. Tucker has built an arrangement of three 14-inch telescopes which allows him to find extremely faint NEOs. The telescope arrangement is fixed so that it scans the sky during the night as the Earth rotates and includes a bimetallic framework which compensates for temperature changes. Because of its arrangement, three sequential images are obtained from the telescope in which the characteristic movement of asteroids and comets relative to the stars can be identified. Roy Tucker is an instumentation engineer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory and has detected 4,852 asteroids of which several hundred have been new discoveries. With the help of GNAT (Global Network of Astronomical Telescopes), he hopes to expand his system into a global network of 48 telescopes. GNAT is looking for universities, schools, and serious amateurs to take part in the network which should make it possible to discover many more asteroids. Amateur astronomers, such as Roy Tucker, are responsible for the discovery of a significant number of NEOs each year.
More info: Global Network of Astronomical Telescopes
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