MPEC statistics
The statistics are made by Jost Jahn, Amrum, Germany, mpecs@jostjahn.de.
They are updated unattended when new or changed MPECs are available. The local database and generated pages are updated incrementally; a complete verification run remains available.
The source program downloads MPECs from the Minor Planet Center and analyzes their MPEC, station, observation, instrument, observer, and measurer relationships.
The histograms are created silently with Gnuplot. The last year is not extrapolated.
MPEC numbers per year
Discovery MPECs per year
Observations per yearComplete station directory
| Station | Station name(s) | Telescopes | Observers | Measurers |
|---|
Statistical tables
All tables contain the complete database result. Pagination and browser search alter only the display, not the underlying data.
MPECs
Stations
People
Methodology
A discovery marker is counted for a station only when the marked observation belongs to that station and the MPEC is eligible for discovery counting. Stars in daily orbit updates are not station discoveries.
Duplicate station names, instruments, observers, and measurers are removed by normalized identity within each station. Exact duplicate observation lines in the same MPEC are stored once. If a source MPEC is corrected, its relationships replace the earlier version transactionally.
No per-mille, percentage, sample, random, or Top-N filter is applied unless it is explicitly selected by the user. Pagination changes only how many rows the browser renders at once; it does not remove records.
Local MPECS database
| Relation | Rows |
|---|---|
| MPECs | 72,026 |
| Stations | 1,930 |
| People | 10,338 |
| Telescopes | 1,350 |
| Observations | 6,318,587 |
| Observation occurrences in MPECs | 6,384,881 |
| Station–MPEC links | 503,011 |
The database uses SQLite journal mode DELETE, never WAL.
New and changed MPEC source files are replaced transactionally; unchanged
files are not parsed again. Persistent aggregate tables keep frequently
requested totals ready instead of recalculating them for every page.
Download the database GUI (EXE version 2026.07.29.2). It provides paged station, person, object and MPEC searches, safe read-only SQL, name-variant decisions, and complete TSV export.
The generated website is backed by a local database used for incremental analysis and consistent statistics.