Spotting an asteroid - software ?

[johnb]

Hi

Im trying to capture an asteroid, I have the Ra and Dec and have shot that area of the sky at intervals - when I look at each image nothing sticks out - having plate solved my images I am looking in the right area - the asteroid is currently Mag 17 (so not exactly bright) and the area of the sky for me I quite light polluted so long exposures are tricky I can manage 120 secs as ISO 800

 

Is there any software that will allow me to overlay my images so I can spot anything moving ?

 

Pointers really appreciated

 

oh the object is: http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=10381+Malinsmith#content

 

John B

[glowingturnip]

off the top of my head (am at work), if you align your separate images to each other, then load one as a layer over the other in photoshop and set blending mode to difference (or do the equivalent with pixelmath in pixinsight), then it should cancel out almost everything in the image, but if lucky, you'll see a white and a black spot in the difference, showing what moved.

[ChrisLX200]

Pinpoint (the Visual Pinpoint app which works with the main plate-solver engine) is good for this job. It will align, stack, normalise and blink multiple images for maunual detection, and it will also offer a list of automatically detected objects (though I've had little real success with the automated method). It also produces a report suitable for sending to the MPC.

ChrisH

[AllanJ]

Nebulosity (not free software) has a useful Blink feature for comparing images. Have a look at the tutorial video in http://www.stark-labs.com/help/nebulositytutorials/tutorials.html

Allan