We present the results of a search for the reactivation of active asteroid 176P/LINEAR during its 2011 perihelion passage using deep optical observations obtained before, during, and after that perihelion passage. Deep composite images of 176P constr
ucted from data obtained between June 2011 and December 2011 show no visible signs of activity, while photometric measurements of the object during this period also show no significant brightness enhancements similar to that observed for 176P between November 2005 and December 2005 when it was previously observed to be active. An azimuthal search for dust emission likewise reveals no evidence for directed emission (i.e., a tail, as was previously observed for 176P), while a one-dimensional surface brightness profile analysis shows no indication of a spherically symmetric coma at any time in 2011. We conclude that 176P did not in fact exhibit activity in 2011, at least not on the level on which it exhibited activity in 2005, and suggest that this could be due to the devolatization or mantling of the active site responsible for its activity in 2005.
Asteroid detections in astronomical images may appear as trails due to a combination of their apparent rate of motion and exposure duration. Nearby asteroids in particular typically have high apparent rates of motion and acceleration. Their recovery,
especially on their discovery apparition, depends upon obtaining good astrometry from the trailed detections. We present an analytic function describing a trailed detection under the assumption of a Gaussian point spread function (PSF) and constant rate of motion. We have fit the function to both synthetic and real trailed asteroid detections from the Pan-STARRS1 survey telescope to obtain accurate astrometry and photometry. For short trails our trailing function yields the same astrometric and photometry accuracy as a functionally simpler 2-d Gaussian but the latter underestimates the length of the trail - a parameter that can be important for measuring the objects rate of motion and assessing its cometary activity. For trails longer than about 10 pixels (> 3xPSF) our trail fitting provides 3-times better astrometric accuracy and up to 2 magnitudes improvement in the photometry. The trail fitting algorithm can be implemented at the source detection level for all detections to provide trail length and position angle that can be used to reduce the false tracklet rate.
