Asteroid (3697) Guyhurst

[Xilman]

Guy Hurst has been the editor of The Astronomer magazine for many years. He also has an asteroid named for him: (3697) Guyhurst.

The BAA-ARPS subsection (asteroids and remote planets, which includes exoplanets) is observing this body over the coming months in an attempt to determine its rotation period. My first data was taken in the wee hours of 2024-02-02 through a Johnson V filter so that standardized photometry can be performed. That detailed analysis is not yet done but here is a stack of 78 40-second images taken with a SX 814 camera attached to the 0.4m Dilworth telescope at Tacande Observatory, aka MPC J22. The track of (3697) Guyhurst as it moves across the sky during those 52 minutes appears in the centre. At the lower right is a Seyfert-2 galaxy, 2MASX J11075004+0942565, which is catalogued at V16.07.  The predicted magnitude of the asteroid is V=17.3.