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The observatory will host two telescopes, with diameter of 30 cm and 40 cm, equipped with CCD and moved by robotic mounts. The 40 cm telescope is a Cassegrain-like configuration, modified to get a short focal length (focal ratio: f/1.8) thus permitting a wide field of view and a good stability on the mount which permits fast LEO objects tracking. The design of optical tube, completely manufactured by students of GAUSS, is shown in the paper. The 30 cm telescope is a Baker-Schmidt (f/2.8). The CCD is equipped with a 4096x4096, 9 μm square, pixels sensor (54 mm diagonal) and will be used for searching campaign and for accurate astrometry measures. The robotic mounts permit full autonomous tracking mode and remote control. The dome has also been designed and manufactured by GAUSS and the design is depicted in the paper, showing solutions adopted in order to achieve transportability and remote control. Whereas the observatory is completely autonomous a large amount of data can be achieved, therefore a lot of efforts have been directed to image processing automation, to screen pictures, separating catalogued targets from uncatalogued ones. The observatory design is described in the paper.

Space debris are a concern for operative satellites and human missions. A large amount of debris is located in Low Earth Orbit and in Geostationary Orbit, and several institutes all around the world monitor the growth of the debris population. Since a few years, GAUSS (Group of Astrodynamics of the University of Rome “La Sapienza”) has been carrying out space debris observation campaigns exploiting amateur astronomers’ facilities. Presently GAUSS is making up, in the frame of a contract with Italian Space Agency (ASI), the first Italian optical observa-tory completely addressed to space debris detection. During the optical campaigns, a large number of images is expected to be archived. This is the reason why a software is needed to process the images in order to automatically detect the objects and correlate them with the catalogue. The algorithm is based mainly on single-frame handling to make the noise level as flat as possible, with a successive two-image comparison which allows removing stars and bi-ases. In the object detection procedure a shape identification algorithm has been avoided, in order to reduce calculation time. The last step is the object identification by comparison with the Two-Line Elements catalogue. The actual position of the detected objects is compared with the propagated positions of the catalogued ones. In conclusion, both the image processing itself and the object identification are performed automatically. The paper describes the logic of the developed algorithm as well as the preliminary results of the software.

In the recent years more and more countries around the world have been concerned with space debris detection and monitoring. In Italy, although satellites and debris have been definitely, though not intentionally, detected by astronomers in the last decades, dedicated observations have never been performed before April 2002. In this month the Group of Astrodynamics of the University of Rome “La Sapienza” (GAUSS) started an optical survey of the geostationary ring from the Campo Catino Astronomical Observatory. This observatory, owned by the “Associazione Astronomica Frusinate” (Frosinone Astronomical Society), is one of the best amateur astronomers’ facilities in Italy: his dome hosts an 80 cm aperture Ritchey-Chrétien telescope, a 25 cm Baker-Schmidt and a 15 cm refractor, while a 40 cm Ritchey-Chrétien is going to be operated in another dome; two CCD sensors are available for such telescopes. For this first GEO campaign, the 25 cm Baker-Schmidt device was chosen, in order to have a wide field of view: the telescope was coupled with an AP-8 10241024 CCD, resulting in a 1°, 50’ FOV. The first nights of observation were dedicated to a survey of the GEO ring: about 90 degrees of right ascension were spanned, collecting several hundreds images and detecting about 100 objects; as the CCD read-out time is about 35 seconds, a relatively long exposure time (20 seconds) was selected, to improve the ratio of exposure time to gap time between frames. The telescope was pointed in a star-tracking mode, so the Earth satellites are easily detected as stripes on a dot-shaped background of stars; hence, two points of the track (lead and trailing edges) per image are generally identified in terms of topocentric right ascension and declination. Moreover, the observed star field is kept constant along some hours of observation, letting the GEO ring cross such field. The data processing, presently managed off-line, is now being carried out, in order to identify the objects and determine their orbits. Of course other observations will be performed in the next months. In the paper the campaign status is described in detail and the results are presented.