Asteroid 2012 SW20 - early observation

[Breakintheclouds]

Okay, so this is a very minor achievement, but nevertheless I'm currently feeling quite pleased with myself. For the first time I've got my name in one of the Minor Planet Electronic Circulars that are issued to announce the discovery of interesting new asteroids. Here's a link to the MPEC, where you can see Baxter Garden Observatory (i.e., my back garden!) listed as the ninth observer of this new object. And I've attached a stack of some of the images I used when making the measurements, in case you're interested. It doesn't look like much, but I'm still feeling quite pleased with myself here...

[Phil Fargaze]

Good work! Do you know magnitude was the asteroid was?

[Demonperformer]

I'm still feeling quite pleased with myself here...

and so you should

[Breakintheclouds]

Good work! Do you know magnitude was the asteroid was?

It seems to be somewhere between 18 and 19. The measurements on that MPEC all vary a lot, which is probably a sign it's spinning rapidly

[lukebl]

Great stuff.

How did you manage to avoid the asteroid appearing as trail? Were they just short exposures, or did you actually guide on the asteroid itself?

[Breakintheclouds]

Yes, these were short exposures. One pixel on my setup is around 1.7 arcseconds, so I always aim to take exposures short enough that the motion is less than this. I tend to use 30 or 40 seconds as a maximum anyway, but some near-Earth objects are so fast that exposures need to be more like 5-10 seconds! I then stack a lot of these - typically 20 or 30 for each measurement - and Astrometrica can pull the motion data off the Internet for each asteroid and stack the pictures using this information so that the asteroid is kept "unmoving".