IAU A79

The proposal of A79 team to call an asteroid they discovered Levski has been approved. The Committee on Small Body Nomenclature in the Solar System at the International Astronomical Union approved the proposal of Bulgarian astronomers, discoverers of the 204831 asteroid, to name the body after Bulgarian revolutionary Vasil Levski. Levski was selected by a nationwide poll as the greatest Bulgarian of all time. The asteroid was discovered on August 14 2007 at the Zvezdno Obshtestvo Observatory.
Vasil Levski was the nickname of Vasil Ivanov Kunchev (18 July 1837-18 February 1873), an ethnic Bulgarian revolutionary renowned as the national hero of Bulgaria. Dubbed the Apostle of Freedom, Levski ideologised and strategised a revolutionary movement to liberate Bulgaria from Ottoman rule. Founding the Internal Revolutionary Organisation, Levski sought to foment a nationwide uprising through a network of secret regional committees.

Our member K. Dankov discovered a new NEO asteroid on the H55 images obtained on 31/01/2009 (see MPC 2009-C09)! The object received designation 2009 BD81 and according to the current orbit it was classified as an Apollo asteroid. The asteroid will reach the maximum brightness of 18.1V on 18/02/2009 and was listed as a risk object (PHA) by NASA/JPL. More information you can find here. Congratulations to Kolyo!

The main belt asteroid discovered by A79 team during the summer of 2007 has been numbered, 2007 PQ28 = 204831. This is the first numbered asteroid found from Bulgaria since 1989!

A new MBA asteroid has been discovered during a short A79 search campaign: 2008 WN96. The body is a typical member of the inner group of the belt and has a period of 3.2 years. Currently the asteroid brightness is 19.9V magnitude. The observations were performed by K. Dankov, L. Vrigazov and F. Fratev.
We temporary opened our observatory, equipped with a new 35cm f/2.6 Orion Optics telescope, and plan to observe to the end of December 2008.

Update 2008/12/20: 2008 WN96 was detected on old NEAT images (SkyMorph archive) from 2001. Additional observations were added by MPC, thus the orbit was improved and the body became observed at 4 oppositions.

During A79 search for MBA, three new asteroids were discovered: 2007 PQ28, 2007 PN29 and 2007 QD2 (see results). Continue Reading →

On 16/08/2007 we tried to recover the comet P/1998 VS24 LINEAR, but found a new brilliant object (17.9m). The body was independently observed by Giovanni Sostero during the same night. The asteroid had a motion in the opposite direction to the surrounded objects and the possibility to be a new NEA was small (about 13%). We suspected that this could be a new comet, but the Giovanni’s observations rejected the hypothesis. Continue Reading →

The comets 136P and 108P were recovered by Giovanni Sostero team (Remanzacco observatory-MPC code 473) and independently confirmed by us few days later (see MPEC 2007-P07  and 2007-O49). F. Fratev and V. Radeva performed a photometry in R band of 108P with help of 50/70 Schmidt telescope at NAO “Rhozen” (MPC 071). This is the first observations of the comets in their return in 2007.

A79 team searched for the comet several days and after the observations made by LINEAR project the object was detected on 16/07/2007 at about 1.8 degree from the predicted position. We measured a coma diameter about 25 arc sec and total magnitude 16.0R (see IAUC 8856). Continue Reading →

The comet activity of the object temporary designed as a BD97323 was found on the images taken from A79 on 18/07/2007. A coma diameter of 14 arc sec was measured. After the observations of other observatories the new comet C/2007 O1 (LINEAR) was announced (see IAUC 8858 and MPEC 2007-O10). The preliminary orbit shows that 17m comet already passed perihelion on July 01, 2007.      

A79 team recovered this comet on 11/01/2007 as a diffuse object at 16.1R magnitude and coma diameter of about 0.2 arc min (IAUC 8795, see results). Continue Reading →