Comment Re:Cpt Obvious Observation (Score 2, Informative) 154
then why wouldn't it be 13 times per year?
I would guess that some of the data is submitted monthly and the tracts show when the data was submitted, not necessarily observed. there's also a lot of big pulses early on, far larger than the overall rate would see to indicate as within the normal deviation of observation rate at that point. hence, the thought that it's mapping based on submission date and some are submitting bulk results on a monthly or quarterly basis.
Well, to an astrophysicist "roughly 12 times" is equivalent to 13 times, but your point is taken. I've sat in with the Catalina guys (on a nearly full moon night, so they didn't discover anything while I was there), and they don't wait to submit data. They send candidate objects to a followup telescope to confirm the discovery, then publish any object with the Minor Planet Center as soon as they are confirmed. They need to act quickly, because orbit refinements often rely on followup observations (often by amateur astronomers), and many objects, especially Near Earth Asteroids, could be lost if they are not followed up quickly. The big pulses in the discovery rates at early times are because objects were only discovered in sensitive surveys that were not run very frequently (and before the mid 1990s usually relied on photographic plates). After about 1997 once LINEAR got going (and later Catalina and a couple others) asteroid surveys have more or less been continuous, with lulls arising due to full moon nights and the weather patterns of southern Arizona and New Mexcio.