We present information on the Bucharest plate catalogues (0.38 m refractor and 0.16 m camera) included in the Wide-Field Plate Database, containing a total of 10, 533 plates. The primary aims of the ...observations were to obtain accurate positions of asteroids (78 percent of all plates) and to serve different observational campaigns. However, the scientific potential of the archived observations is much larger, with possibilities for investigations of bright visual binaries, long-term variability of the Pleiades red dwarf stars, and potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids. (Author)
Besides new observations, mining old photographic plates and CCD image archives represents an opportunity to recover and secure newly discovered asteroids, also to improve the orbits of Near Earth ...Asteroids (NEAs), Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) and Virtual Impactors (VIs). These are the main research aims of the EURONEAR network. As stated by the IAU, the vast collection of image archives stored worldwide is still insufficiently explored, and could be mined for known NEAs and other asteroids appearing occasionally in their fields. This data mining could be eased using a server to search and classify findings based on the asteroid class and the discovery date as "precoveries" or "recoveries". We built PRECOVERY, a public facility which uses the Virtual Observatory SkyBoT webservice of IMCCE to search for all known Solar System objects in a given observation. To datamine an entire archive, PRECOVERY requires the observing log in a standard format and outputs a database listing the sorted encounters of NEAs, PHAs, numbered and un-numbered asteroids classified as precoveries or recoveries based on the daily updated IAUMPC database. As a first application, we considered an archive including about 13,000 photographic plates exposed between 1930 and 2005 at the Astronomical Observatory in Bucharest, Romania. PRECOVERY can be applied to other archives, being intended as a public facility offered to the community by the EURONEAR project. This is the first of a series of papers aimed to improve orbits of PHAs and NEAs using precovered data derived from archives of images to be data mined in collaboration with students and amateurs. In the next paper we will search the CFHT Legacy Survey, while data mining of other archives is planned for the near future.
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