Mystery Maps

Would anyone like to guess what data set I'm mapping in the images below?  Answer below the fold.......

That's right!  These are the locations of all observatories approved by the Minor Planet Center for submission of asteroid observations. It's a tricky thing to plot, because the official list of MPC Observatory Codes only lists longitude and two "parallax constants," but not latitude. The parallax constants are rho*sin(lat) and rho*cos(lat), where rho is the local distance to the center of the Earth in units of average Earth radii (so most are <1). At the time I put the data together, I couldn't see how to determine rho at each latitude when it was latitude I was trying to figure out!

So at the time, I just approximated rho=1 everywhere and calculated two estimated latitudes, one for each parallax constant. That's why when you look closely at the maps, every observatory is marked with two points (1 blue, 1 red) separated in latitude. Although as I've thought about writing this blog post, I've remembered some of my basic trigonometry, namely:  

[rho*sin(lat)]^2 + [rho*cos(lat)]^2 = rho^2

So of course, it's actually pretty easy to exactly determine both rho and lat from the given data. But I won't redo these maps before posting them here.  I'm considering it a good first step, and just enough info to draw some conclusions about which observatories are approved for asteroid work. Science is an iterative process, and our successes are built upon our failures. And writing this blog post for broader consumption is what helped me realize the answer, so yay blogging!  I may come back to do this more accurately if there's anyone out there who can tell me how to upload a long list of coords into Google Maps or Google Earth. (At the moment it's all a chart in Excel.)

My primary goal here was to determine which telescopes on the Skynet online telescope network (skynet.unc.edu) still need observatory codes. I found three that do. The first is at Morehouse Planetarium and Science Center at Chapel Hill, NC:

The second is GORT - the GLAST Optical Robotic Telescope at Sonoma State University in CA:

And the third is Dark Skies Observatory at Appalachian State University in NC:

We are actually working on this in reverse the order presented here. My students Cameron and Kayla are working on DSO and GORT, respectively, over the next week or two. After that, and after our new astronomical nighttime camera is installed and balanced properly at our own local observatory, we'll be adding a point on this map for Columbus, GA! We're laying the groundwork. Exciting stuff.