Introducing the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey Main-belt Comet Search

As of today, Comet Hunters has a new dataset and a new look. You’ll notice there’s now a button called ‘HSC Survey Search’ on the front page of the website.  We are thrilled to announce the incorporation of data from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program. Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) is the largest field-of-view camera ever stuck on an 8-10-m class telescope. HSC covers nine times the size of the full moon in a single pointing!

What makes this so exciting is that the asteroid images you can review now on Comet Hunters from this survey are as from as close to right off the telescope as we can get. This means we can follow-up and try to catch the asteroid still in the act if Comet Hunters spots a tail. No one has ever looked at these images for main-belt comets before. Your eyes will be one of the first to view these images. Who knows what we’ll find!

The old Comet Hunters classification interface you know and love is still around. It’s now under the ‘Archival Data Search’ on the Comet Hunters front page. Looking for main-belt comets in the archival Suprime-Cam data is still extremely useful, and we’ll be keeping that classification interface going in parallel to the HSC Survey Search. You’ll notice the HSC images are a bit different than the Archival Data Search. There’s a tutorial and help buttons that will show you how find tails in the HSC images. You can also find more information on the Research and FAQ pages as well.

Dive into the HSC Survey data and help search for main-belt comets today!