Not a more-famous journal, but this issue of New Astronomy (vol. 112, Nov) has something:
Castro, A. Michel, R. Castro Segura, N. et al. First light simultaneous triple-channel optical observations of the OPTICAM system at the OAN-SPM art. 102262 .2024.102262
We have over a million small bodies now, including tens of thousands in NEO orbits. How can we possibly study them all? For the closer NEOs in particular, they pass Earth and go into sunlight after a few months. Then they don’t come back out of the Sun’s glare for a while (their “synodic period”). The NEOs with especially close, accessible orbits have synodic periods of several years. It is important to study them in those few months when they in Earth’s vicinity, yet out of daylight. One way to do so is via medium- to wide-band cameras. Instead of viewing celestial targets as just a dot, they use beamsplitters to break the incoming light into two, three, sometimes four color filters. This is nowhere near as much information as we get from a true spectrograph, but we can take shorter exposures of dimmer targets. Targets like fleeting asteroids. The three or four colors then get us a crude colorimetry, at minimum, and likely a spectral slope (“positive”, or reddish body, “neutral”, or greyish, rarely a bit “negative” or faint blue). Colorimetry alone is enough to classify- initially- a body into the S- or C-complex. S-type bodies and their relatives are mostly reddish (with some fainter red exceptions), C-types are neutral grey or, in some cases, the bluish ones. (And in the middle we have oddballs we lump into the X-complex- not literally neutral greys or positive reds, but transitory tones.) Taking that fourth color is good for breaking ambiguities, including the ambiguity of noisy data. Multiple telescopes around the world have thus installed three- or four-color instruments; they’re also good for taking stellar temperatures, redshifts of distant objects, etc.
Castro et al. now introduce and publish the work of the new OPTICAM instrument, at the San Pedro Martir site of Mexico’s national astronomical observatory (or, OAN in Spanish). Welcome, Castro et al. and OPTICAM; we have almost a million small bodies we need you to check!