Speaker
Description
The 60/90/180 cm Schmidt telescope of the Konkoly Observatory, located at the Piszkéstető Mountain Station in Hungary, has always been a discovery machine.
In the first three decades of operations as a photographic instrument with a 5 degree field of view, it has resulted in the discovery of 47 supernovae, five comets and ten minor planets. The photographic plates were replaced by CCD cameras in the late 1990s, and in the last five years we performed an upgrade that led to a 9 square degrees field of view. With this upgrade and new observing strategies, we have discovered more than eighty NEOs during two years.
Of these one was 2022 EB5, the fifth known asteroid to have been discovered before it impacted the Earth. Although physically small, this minor body (with a size of a “half-giraffe”, an expression that turned quickly into various memes in the social media) highlighted very important lessons on the technical and scientific aspects, not to mention possible broader impacts on the society in regards of the importance of planetary defense.
