How was Quaoar found?
First of all, we are looking for objects like Quaoar because we think there may be a lot of objects like it that are undiscovered, and maybe even objects bigger than Pluto. We spent about 7 months looking for it with a semi-automated telescope, the Oschin Telescope at Palomar, California. It has a mirror diameter of 48 inches (1.2 meters), which is large compared to amateur telescopes (typically ranging from 0.1 – 0.3 meters in diameter), but small compared to most professional telescopes (1 – 10 meters in diameter). Although the mirror isn’t very big, the Oschin Telescope has a huge field of view for its size, about 3 square degrees. That’s about the same amount of sky area as 12 moons in each picture. Here’s the discovery images. We took three pictures of the same patch of sky with 90 minutes between them. These pictures are about 150th of the entire field we get with the telescope. In a single night, we cover about 1700 times the area you see below. Click for enlargement: You can do
