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I have some data that I collected from observations at a specific RA, DEC and I am trying to figure out what telescope surveys were looking at that portion of the sky at that particular time? I am currently trying to use NAVO's python notebooks to query databases but I'm struggling.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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The areas of the sky covered by the major Near Earth Object (NEO) surveys are reported to the Minor Planet Center. You can plot visualizations of that sky coverage data using the sky coverage form where you can filter by depth, date and survey. The raw data is available, after the surveys give permission for it to be released, from the raw data page. This provides a download link to a tarball of all the pointing data so far, broken down by survey site and then a file per night. The description of the pointing fields is also shown on that page; hopefully it shouldn't be too hard to use a combination of e.g. astroPy's Table and 'SkyCoord` to read and parse the data.

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  • $\begingroup$ A version of this might also be a good answer to Might the SpaceX Roadster intercept any ongoing surveys? $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Commented May 19, 2019 at 22:09
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    $\begingroup$ The Roadster is too small and faint to be picked up at the V~21.5 limit of the surveys unless it's very close which isn't predicted before 2047 according to JPL Horizons $\endgroup$
    – astrosnapper
    Commented May 19, 2019 at 23:58
  • $\begingroup$ I show a plot of magnitude vs time in the question. That one sentence, posted there as an answer, would be instantly accepted. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Commented May 20, 2019 at 0:13
  • $\begingroup$ It's not quite that straightforward. What is needed is the long term prediction of position and magnitude and that depends on good values of the absolute magnitude, the phase function, whether there are any non-gravitational forces acting on it, whether anything else will outgas from the vehicle or booster and the actual orbit, none of which we have a very good handle on. Integrating all of this forward would make me very nervous about making any kind of recovery prediction beyond "it very likely would be recovered by a survey if bright/close enough" $\endgroup$
    – astrosnapper
    Commented May 21, 2019 at 16:00
  • $\begingroup$ The question only asks about a 200 day period in 2018, and the spacecraft likely dimmed below V~21.5 early in that period, so "No, because 'Roadster is too small and faint to be picked up at the V~21.5 limit of the surveys' in that time period" is a complete answer to the question. I'd just like to get something definitive there, and "it's too dim" seems to be pretty definitive. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Commented May 21, 2019 at 16:18

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