This will not be the first search of the sky for small comets with a ground-based telescope. About 10 years ago Clayne Yeates, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California designed a very clever way of detecting the small comets with the Spacewatch Telescope of the University of Arizona. His method relied upon passage of small comets by the Earth in an organized stream as inferred from the motions of atmospheric holes observed with Dynamics Explorer 1. Clayne, like so many other scientists in the 1980s, did not believe that the small comets existed. His technique to detect these small, dark, fast objects is shown in Figure 28 [left]. Telescopes are traditionally pointed so that they are staring at the stars. In order to see the small comets Clayne used the telescope in a "skeet shooting" manner. In other words, the telescope's pointing was moved in such a way as to keep the small comets in the sights of the telescope for a sufficiently long time that they would be recorded in the images.Here is a link (from 1988) to his feat of using a moving field of view: Science Frontiers Online, No. 58, July-August, 1988.
To Clayne's surprise he in fact did find the small comets in his images and in numbers that were predicted from the observations of atmospheric holes. The small comets were clearly detected in the images. Astronomers insisted that the comets should be detected in two consecutive photographs. Clayne returned to the telescope and gained these pairs of images of each small comet. Astronomers returned with the ridiculous demand that they now needed three images. The small comets were there and the astronomers of the Spacewatch Telescope could only offer the now familiar "camera noise" as a defense. Because of his untimely death Clayne was not able to continue his brilliant applications of ground-based telescopes in the pursuit of small comets.
"Using a telescope with a moving field of view -- a difficult technique that required a year of preliminary calculations to plan -- physicist Clayne Yeates has found and photographed what seems to be a population of fastmoving objects near earth that range between 8 and 16 feet in size. These previously undetected bodies match Frank's predictions concerning the speed, direction and number of pro posed comets flying by earth, says Yeates, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Another link here on the subject of optical telescope evidence of small comets.
Yeah, funny how that works, eh?
I’m surprised the AAAS didn’t have one of their Stalin-style show trials for Louis Frank et al — but then again, Carl Sagan’s dead, so those may have gone out of style.