CATCHing the Sky

The Comet Asteroid Telescope Catalog Hunter¹ (CATCH) is a search tool for large astronomical data sets designed with small bodies in mind.  With the GUI as an extension of the API base, the CATCH service can be easily used in automated software routines. The service is cloud-deployed, and virtual machines can be scaled up to support higher user loads as needed.  CATCH was built as a service to find observations of moving targets, i.e., comets and asteroids. Use CATCH to help identify pre-discovery observations of a target, to examine past cometary activity, or to help you understand why a survey did not detect or report observations of an object. Now on its third version, CATCH service now includes capabilities to search for astrophysical datasets. It also identifies stellar sources within the images, and provides additional visualization for the viewing geometries, in addition to augmentations that increase the speed of the tool and allow for larger datasets to be added to the search tool’s database. CATCH allows for the extraction of individual exposures of specified small bodies for study from massive quantities of all-sky survey exposures. In order to accomplish the required search through the data in reasonable query-times, the team has developed novel temporal-spatial indexing techniques and database architectures.

We will discuss the current state of CATCH, and future plans for software augmentations that will allow for photometry and astrometry analysis products for users to assess the data quality on the fly and better support reporting of precovery detections to the Minor Planet Center.

¹ https://catch.astro.umd.edu/about