Christian Veillet (CFHT), James Anderson (University of Victoria)
CFH12k, an 8kx12k CCD mosaic at CFHT 3.6-m prime focus, is now in operation. Scheduled for more than 70 nights a semester, it provides 20 to 30 Gbytes of data per night. Most of the images are taken for various programs not related to Solar System observation. Due to CFH12k field size (40'x30') and sensitivity, however, many asteroids are recorded on the images taken not too far from the ecliptic. In order to systematically find these moving objects (PI permitting) as rapidly as possible, a processing pipeline optimized for this search has been developed and is now running in parallel with the CFH12k observations. This presentation will describe the successive steps of the data processing which has to face unusual challenges for this type of program, as the image size or the far from optimized sequencing of the observations: - preliminary CCD image reduction (based on IRAF scripts) - object extraction (based on Sextractor) - astrometric reduction - strategy of image selection for further moving object detection - image detection algorithms from a set of three images - html based report on discoveries including animated images - final formatting of the observations for the Minor Planet Center All these steps are automatically done as soon as the needed data are available. The only "human factor" is the ultimate check of the discoveries, with a mouse button click generating the file to be mailed to the MPC. The last results from the previous nights will illustrate the talk, thanks to a computer based presentation.