A mini moon!

[LondonNeil]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3dvxgrmk95o

 

Won't be visible?  Satellites are so...?

[Simon Pepper]

I saw this earlier and thought it quite interesting. I have tried hunting asteroids in my images before in pi using image solver and loading in the asteroids and then annotating them, however I think they are just to faint for my setups. I need to check again to see if I can see any as others have good success. Depends on the magnitude of this one anything over 16 and probably no chance for me! 

[Gfamily]

32 minutes ago, Simon Pepper said:

I saw this earlier and thought it quite interesting. I have tried hunting asteroids in my images before in pi using image solver and loading in the asteroids and then annotating them, however I think they are just to faint for my setups. I need to check again to see if I can see any as others have good success. Depends on the magnitude of this one anything over 16 and probably no chance for me! 

22nd magnitude - so I'd have thought a very long way beyond your reach. 

10 metres across, at a distance of almost 3.5million km - and likely very dark grey in colour I gather. 

I can show you where it is - start of arrow is 29th September, the head is where it'll be as it leaves 'orbit' on 24th November

( I was asked by a Club member if I could give an explanation at our next meeting on Friday)

 

Edited Wednesday at 19:49 by Gfamily

[Simon Pepper]

I just checked my scopes and limiting mag is 14.3 on the best one. What scopes are people using to see these dimmer asteroids? What scopes perform best at this 15 upwards? 

[Oldfort]

At 22nd mag, I think this would have been beyond the reach of even Mt Palomar, back in the day of photographic emulsion.

[John]

I've got down to mag 14.8 with my old 12 inch dob from my back yard. Probably mag 15 and a bit under a really dark. 

The imagers have got much more chance of picking this one up than us visual folks I reckon.

 

 

[Astroscot2]

Reckon this is a job for Lukebl. 

[Paul M]

My RC10 has been down to mag 22 by stacking a lot of long exposures. Even then, the target was just above the noise.

The problem with asteroids, and particularly fast moving asteroids, is that they move against the field stars. So even during a tracked long exposure, the light isn't falling on the same pixels. And when the subs are stacked, again, the asteroids lights doesn't get combined.

So the painfully faint light is spread across the frame, not accumulated in a stellar sized image.

You would need to track your telescope on the asteroids calculated position to have a chance.

I've spotted mag 20 asteroids in a few images, but I've stacked them in ASTAP using the ephemerides function. It stacks the subs to the singular calculated position.... hopefully