Dr. Katherine Volk

And one of the reasons they had to use Hubble is because they had to search in the galactic plane.

And when you image a galactic plane from the ground, it's just a sea of stars.

And when you're imaging things from the ground, the point spread function on those stars isn't awesome because you have the atmosphere and other things making them kind of fuzz out.

And then your close-up images look like this.

They tried to do a ground search, and these are images Alex Parker blogged about their ground search for a flyby target.

And they did find a couple things.

So you can see this little tiny object here, which turned out to be a Neptune Trojan.

in their search field.

But this looks pretty bad.

You can imagine that there's probably a lot of other Kuiper belt objects in this field that just happen to be on top of stars when it was imaged or they're in the fuzzed out region even if they're not right in front of the stars.

And it's a nightmare for the computer algorithms because one of the common false positives that you get in your moving object search are kind of speckles like this.

where you've got some sort of diffraction effect from the star and it looks brighter for a moment and sometimes that diffraction effect moves in the images so the pipeline thinks it's a Kuiper Belt object even though it isn't.

There's just a lot more manual effort when you have to actually do this in the galactic plane.

So since we have not yet gotten to the stage of all-sky surveys, when you ask for telescope time to do a limited area survey, you might as well not look in the worst part of the sky.

Now, one thing that is going to be a game changer for Kuiper Belt science that is starting up reasonably soon is LSST.

So this is the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

And they're going to be imaging most of the southern sky.

And there's still some arguments about how effective it's going to be, exactly how many objects it's going to get.

But this is kind of the search area.

And I picked a color based on about how deep they think they're going to go to compare to our current map.