Pluto!

[Paul M]

Is it a bird? is it a plane?

No, it's Pluto   In the early o'clocks of this morning I was enjoying my first session in a while and while looking for exciting subjects noticed in SkySafar that Pluto had just transited. Low down in the murk but reachable from my location (secret location) not far from home. I plugged the RA and DEC given by SkySafari into APT and off it went and successfully synced on the location but checking the field in HNSky found Pluto to be out of frame??

Hmfff...I then used the coordinates given by HNSky and found them to be some minutes different! Anyway, tried again using the new numbers, it looked better. Ran the first sub through ASTAP's asteroid annotation tool (oh yeah? why is Pluto showing up there?  )  and it was right there.

I know, it's just a speck but I gave up years ago on ever getting a visual fix on it down there in the nether regions. So I was very pleased indeed to finally bag my 9th.

As always, do not adjust your sets:

Edited July 19, 2021 by Paul M

[morimarty]

Well done on capturing Pluto it is something I would like to try myself.  Think I will have to dust down the deepsky rig to have any chance of success 🙂

[rwilkey]

Impressive, well done, I saw it noted on my app, 'Sky Map' yesterday, but thought it was just below the horizon.

[Paul M]

I returned to Pluto last night. Very poor conditions. I did get some more subs and I decided to make a GIF showing the motion over one day.

It was a real struggle to get this. There was some field rotation between the two nights and vastly different image quality which took some fixing.