Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams
How to Report a Discovery
Discovery of many kinds of transient astronomical phenomena (e.g., comets, novae, supernovae, etc.) should be reported to the CBAT. The Bureau is responsible for assigning designations to comets and supernovae.
Meteor(ite)/fireball reports should not be reported to the Bureau, but to
the Fireball Data Center of the International Meteor Organization
(e-mail: idac@imo.net).
Discoveries of new minor planets should be reported to the Minor Planet Center.
A listing of the information that you should include in any discovery report concerning comets, supernovae, novae, outbursts of variable stars, or features on planetary surfaces is available.
If you wish to report a discovery you may report it in this
manner. Please ensure that you
have read the documentation on what information you should include in
your report --- incomplete reports may be ignored.
You should e-mail a report directly to
cbatiau@eps.harvard.edu.
Note that some information about the type of object and the nature
of the observation should appear in the subject header; because of
spam-filtering software, a subject line left blank will normally
be thrown out (subject to later manual sifting) and could be lost permanently.
Please read this to see how to represent non-standard characters.
ALERT! We have introduced additional screening software to block spam e-mail, due to its prolific increase; it is strongly recommended that those sending e-mail to the CBAT (or ICQ or MPC) remove ALL html-encoded text, as we cannot read such text easily (we do not use web browsers for reading e-mail) and such text may be deleted by our anti-spam software. (This means: send plain ASCII text *only*, *not* plain ASCII text plus html-encoded text in same message.) [11/14/03]
Some items submitted for publication in the IAUCs are assessed line charges. Here is a description of which items are subject to line charges and the current line-charge rates.
Go to the Index
