Kuiper Belt searches from the Palomar 5-m telescope

Motivated by a desire to understand the size distributon of the Kuiper Belt, an observing program was conducted at the Mount Palomar 5-m telescope from 1994-1996. The observations consisted of follow-up observations of known objects (in order to improve their very indeterminate orbits), and deep exposures on a single field to search for small objects below the limiting magnitudes of other surveys. Eighteen object recoveries were successfully obtained over the course of the follow-up program. Data reduction of the deep fields consisted of a software recombination of many fields shifted at different angular rates in order to detect objects at differing heliocentric distances. We set an upper limit of
4 pages, 2 figures, accepted by A&A Letters