Asteroids ........ I'm hooked!!!

[swag72]

Following on from an accidental capture the other night of (582) Olympia I am hooked in this asteroid malarkey.

Of course I only imaged a 'white dot' - But it is an asteroid from the Asteroid belt that is 43km in diameter and travelling at 18km/s. I don't want to go looking for new asteroids, but on nights when the moon is too bright I am going to image more of these little things!!

I am truly amazed that from my garden I can image something of that size I've even done a little video of it if anyone is interested  ..... or perhaps it's just me ....... I can't link to the video directly, but it's at the bottom of this page - I've also got carried away with an asteroid page on my website !!!!! 

If I'm mad, then please give me a kick up the proverbial  

[Brent]

Excellent presentation, Sara.

I also was planning to do more imaging of asteroids after capturing 2012 DA14 on its close pass in Feb 2013. Then I got into struggling with introducing guiding to my setup and I haven't done any asteroids since!

By the way, that last image in your video of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter scares the heck out of me!

At the minute I'm halfway through "Lucifer's Hammer" by Larry Niven, that one's about a comet, but still.

[SilverAstro]

54 minutes ago, swag72 said:

've even done a little video of it if anyone is interested

If I'm mad,

Interesting, nice one and great page, thank you.

I thought that was a prerequisite for this hobby !

As for 'only when the moon is bright', we will all wait to see how that plays out, , , once you have captured all the bright ones , , , , heheee who knows how hooked you will become, after all, those wee fuzzies will always be there whereas ,,,   Hmmmm, I've just thought, even when it's cloudy there are things to do, you can inspect your pics for positional info and then get into Kepler etc and work out their orbits to make up your own MPC type files, ready for when you do discover a new one . Oh hours of fun ahead ! From its speed and direction I wonder if you have enough data there to recover (582) Olympia tonight without looking in CdC ?

[swag72]

Thanks @Brent and @SilverAstro - You guys really aren't helping!!! Glad that you liked the page..... I hope that people find it interesting.

I did capture more data on NGC4565 last night as I still have some DSO stuff to do (  ) and Olympia is no longer in my frame. With the ODK10 and KAF8300 I am working at quite small scale for this stuff I believe. 

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Really like the animation, and nice write-up.

No, you're not mad, or at least no madder than the rest of us. It's just a dot, but a dot with significance - part of the story of our solar system. In isolation a single asteroid may not be that interesting but it's a relic of the processes that eventually formed planets, pecans and pelicans.

Similarly, I was gobsmacked to find I'd picked up a Quasar in one of my images that's 8 billion light years away. It's barely even a dot at about mag 19.5 but I'm pretty confidant it's not noise, and I'm getting this with a 200mm camera lens. I've since found out there is an even more distant Quasar that's easier to pick up, as it's gravitationally lensed by a foreground galaxy.

[Astroboy239]

Fantastic presentation!! You captured an object which is far and small. Its actual difficult to get asteroids. Your page is also really good. I better run and start hunting asteroids ?

Clear skies

Good luck

Varad ?

[Linda]

That is really cool.

[swag72]

Cheers guys for your comments...... I don't think I'll look for quasars!! But it will be interesting to see at what magnitude I can image asteroids. 

I will create a timelapse for them all

@Astroboy239 - There's a database of over 700,000 asteroids now in my planetarium software..... It will be easy to get them. Just tell me scope to point to a star next to it!

[Astroboy239]

I use Carted du Ciel and sometimes stellerium 

Varad ☺

[Astroboy239]

I mean cartes du ciel 

[Knight of Clear Skies]

3 hours ago, swag72 said:

I don't think I'll look for quasars!!

It's likely you've already picked up one or more in some of your deep images, although visually they wouldn't be as striking as your asteroid animation.

[bish]

I don't image but there is something satisfying about finding an asteroid and tracking it. 

[SilverAstro]

On 07/06/2016 at 15:39, swag72 said:

 I don't think I'll look for quasars!! But it will be interesting to see at what magnitude I can image asteroids. 

I've been playing with getting (some of ) NOMAD into my CdC and you seem to be down in the Vmag17 and less near Olympia and that PGC is listed as out of the Half Million Quasars Cat. but I dont have any other info on it :-

 

[swag72]

I thought that it looked like Olympia on CdC and I'd loaded in the latest information

[Guy Wells]

Asteroids