 | The topic of this articlemay not meet Wikipedia'sgeneral notability guideline. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citingreliable secondary sources that areindependent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to bemerged,redirected, ordeleted. Find sources: "Northolt Branch Observatories" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(February 2025) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
 Northolt Branch Observatories logo | |||||||||
| Alternative names | NBO | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Observatory code | Z80, Z48, Z37[1] | ||||||||
| Location |
| ||||||||
| Coordinates | 51°33′17″N0°22′19″W / 51.55466°N 0.37192°W /51.55466; -0.37192 | ||||||||
| Altitude | 55 metres (180 ft) | ||||||||
| Established | September 27, 2015 (2015-09-27)[2] | ||||||||
| Website | www | ||||||||
| Telescopes | |||||||||
| |||||||||
  Location of Northolt Branch Observatories | |||||||||
 | |||||||||
TheNortholt Branch Observatories is anastronomical observatory located inLondon, England.[3]NBO collects follow-upastrometry ofnear-Earth asteroids and other small Solar System objects.[4]
Northolt Branch Observatories was founded in 2015,[4] as an extension of the London-basedNortholt Branch Astro group of localamateur astrophotographers.[5] It is a British-German collaboration: Data is collected on-site by observers at the telescopes in England, and then processed remotely from Germany.[6]
Chris Lintott described them as "amongst the sharpest players of this game" of NEO spotting, pointing out that their location in West London suffers from so muchlight pollution that it "could lay serious claim to being the place with the worst possible conditions from which to observe the sky".[4]
The twomain belt asteroids72834 Guywells and128345 Danielbamberger are named after members of the Northolt Branch Observatories team.[7][8]
One of their observations was designated 2020 GL2 by theMinor Planet Center in its catalogue.[4]Observed by NBO between 2020-04-10 and 2020-04-12 and reported by them, it was retrospectively discovered in earlier images from other telescopes in California and Hawai'i, but later formally retracted by the MPC from the catalogue, a rare event, when it was determined to be ESA'sBepiColombo.[9][10]Their images of BepiColombo from those nights went on later the same month to win an informal ESA competition for the "best track" of the spacecraft.[11]