DebrisWatch II: Digging Deeper for Geosynchronous Debris
James A Blake, Benjamin F Cooke, Cristina Paragini, William Feline, Christopher A Onken, Don Pollacco, Grant Privett, Toshifumi Yanagisawa, Robert Airey, Ioannis Apergis, Roberto Armellin, Lily Beesley, Paul Chote, Anna-Maria Cutolo, Stuart Eves, Tomoko Fujiwara, Daisuke Kuroda, Isobel S Lockley, Alexander MacManus, James McCormac, Morgan A Mitchell, Tokuhiro Nimura, Kota Nishiyama, Shin-ichiro Okumura, Thomas Schildknecht, Billy Shrive, Seitaro Urakawa, Dimitri Veras, Phineas Whitlock, Christian Wolf · 2026
Read DebrisWatch II: Digging Deeper for Geosynchronous Debris by James A Blake, Benjamin F Cooke, Cristina Paragini, William Feline, Christopher A Onken, Don Pollacco, Grant Privett, Toshifumi Yanagisawa, Robert Airey, Ioannis Apergis, Roberto Armellin, Lily Beesley, Paul Chote, Anna-Maria Cutolo, Stuart Eves, Tomoko Fujiwara, Daisuke Kuroda, Isobel S Lockley, Alexander MacManus, James McCormac, Morgan A Mitchell, Tokuhiro Nimura, Kota Nishiyama, Shin-ichiro Okumura, Thomas Schildknecht, Billy Shrive, Seitaro Urakawa, Dimitri Veras, Phineas Whitlock, Christian Wolf (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13294242.txt.
Description
James A Blake heads DebrisWatch II, a 2026 reanalysis of geosynchronous debris watched with the 2.54 m Isaac Newton Telescope. Faint debris near the crowded ring is hard to census because coverage trades against sensitivity. Better star trail centering, distortion fitting, and blind image stacking were applied to old survey frames and to a matching small telescope dataset.
Stacking recovered 25 object tracks missed before and pushed detection one magnitude fainter. Position accuracy fell under one arcsecond, enough for starter orbits from short arcs. A modest 36 cm astrograph was benchmarked against the big scope, showing what cheap gear can recover. Light curves hint at object spin and shape.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | James A Blake, Benjamin F Cooke, Cristina Paragini, William Feline, Christopher A Onken, Don Pollacco, Grant Privett, Toshifumi Yanagisawa, Robert Airey, Ioannis Apergis, Roberto Armellin, Lily Beesley, Paul Chote, Anna-Maria Cutolo, Stuart Eves, Tomoko Fujiwara, Daisuke Kuroda, Isobel S Lockley, Alexander MacManus, James McCormac, Morgan A Mitchell, Tokuhiro Nimura, Kota Nishiyama, Shin-ichiro Okumura, Thomas Schildknecht, Billy Shrive, Seitaro Urakawa, Dimitri Veras, Phineas Whitlock, Christian Wolf |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 104272 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |