M64 and which asteroid?

[Martin Meredith]

Looking through this capture of M64 from the other night I spotted something that wasn't on the charts. Although I've tentatively labelled it as Olympia based on SkySafari, it isn't quite where SS thinks it ought to be. Could anyone confirm that it is Olympia? I have several shots but a time difference of only 10.5 minutes from earliest to latest, and I can't detect any motion. Magnitude-wise it looks about right for this asteroid. Time shown on the image is 1 hour ahead of UK time.

Martin

[dph1nm]

Yep, spot on. At 22:29UT on 3/7/2016 (which I assume is what you mean) it should be at 12m 57m 07.83s +21deg 43' 15.8'' with a magnitude of 14.35, taken from http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi

You might want to repeat it with your exact location - I used Calar Alto (which is southern Spain, I know).

cheers

NigelM

[aparker]

My copy of Sky Safari (v4 Pro) shows Olympia pretty close to where you have it.  Based on your observation is looks like Sky Safari's track is about 2 arcmin off of where it ought to be.  Doesn't seem like an outlandish amount of error.  The date ticks below are for EDT, so 6 hours behind you.  I think that you may have launched a new EAA sub-specialty here - I'm thinking there are going to be many opportunities to capture images of minor planets sailing past interesting DSOs.  With inner solar system objects like this, you should be able to get some nice visible displacement on a 30-60 min interval (as opposed to our look at Makemake, where you would need to come back on successive days).  There must be thousands of inner system asteroids bright enough for EAA.

[Martin Meredith]

Thanks Nigel and Alex. This is what my SS (Pro, v1.8) shows

Maybe it is time to update my version of SS (I already updated the asteroids catalogue but it made no difference).

Martin

 

[Astrojedi]

Great capture Martin. 

[laudropb]

Very nice capture.

[orion25]

Excellent capture of ol' Blackeye! And an asteroid to boot!

Great job, buddy 

 

Regards,

Reggie