Observing asteroid 89 Julia

[iamjulian]

Saturday night I did another family outreach type event. Pointing the scope at some of the brighter messier objects and trying to explain what they were looking at. It was really windy but the sky was mostly clear and the atmosphere seemed quite still. I dragged the scope to the bottom of the garden so that we could look back over the house at Jupiter. I think that view that impressed people the most and they all said they could see the bands. I also pointed out the brighter naked eye stars and constellations and they were really happy at seeing the milky way. Apart from Jupiter, and Saturn, my favourite thing to show people is the double cluster in Perseus. With a 2.5 degree view nobody can believe how many stars they can see. And the final view before they headed indoors was Mars, just rising in the East so twinkling quite a bit in the atmosphere, but very colourful.

Once they were back in the house eating toast and drinking tea, I turned my attention back to the top left corner of the square of Pegasus, where I was tracking the asteroid 89 Julia. I saw it last Friday night and wanted to image it for a second time to show how it had moved. I know this is the observing section so apologies for the image, but it is only to demonstrate what I was observing. It wasn't noticeably moving and it just looked like a small star through the 25mm EP and barlow. The bottom photo I took last week and is three stacked photos. The top image is a single photo taken 8 nights later - the wind wrecked all the other photos I took. So not the best photo, but definitely shows the asteroid in exactly the place predicted by Cartes du Ciel (Stellarium isn't up to much in terms of asteroids, Cartes du Ciel is much better).

I couldn't resist getting the calculator out. It had moved 12,713,724 kilometers in 8 nights

[tinvek]

nice report and nice work on julia. love the idea of a family outreach event . it's amazing how many people when you give them the chance actually find our hobby interesting isn't it?

have you tried pleiades with them. i got my son to count how many stars he could see with the naked eye before letting him look through the scope and counting again, it took him a while to accept he was looking at the same object

[kniclander]

wow - I think that is really impressive stuff - well done.

how did you take the pic?

[MikeP]

I did not think asteroids would be visible with our relatively modest scopes. That is a brilliant capture.

Mike

PS SkyMap has a download facility. Last time I tried to download asteroid data, I stopped it at 200,000 - goodness knows how many were in the catalog.

[iamjulian]

tinvek, nice idea with the counting stars, I will have to try that.

kniclander, thank you, it was just an SLR piggy backed on the scope.

mike, I found a list of the brighter asteroids somewhere, there are a couple of dozen at least below mag 10 or 11. 89 Julia is about mag 9 at the moment. My next target is Melpomene which is 8 point something and Vesta and Juno which are both quite bright too. I saw Ceres in the Spring in Leo with a pair of bins.

[Talitha]

Well done. It's wonderful of you to show others the night sky, and thanks for showing us 89 Julia.. that's so cool !

[AztecastroMcJ]

great pics

and description

even working out distance moved too

well done

James