Asteroid Discovery Lab

This project actually pre-dates AGL Initiatives, but it is still a goody.

Ok, so in 2003, I accidentally discovered an asteroid. Here’s the long story short. My college professor and I quickly realized that the approach I used could be replicated, and we went on to discovery many more asteroids. (In fact, Calvin College, my alma mater, has discovered more than 400 additional asteroids since that first discovery, including four that were discovered by some of my high school students.)

While I was still in college, I created the “asteroid discovery lab” so that I could share the thrill of discovery asteroids with young students. The project is a simple website with six animated gifs of astronomical fields. Students search the animations for new asteroids and then record and report their discoveries.

The images in the project were originally used to discovery 12 new asteroids. So, the project closely reflects the true asteroid discovery process.