Astronomy

57424 Caelumnoctu, 27th September 2007

At magnitude 18.95 this was never going to be easy! With a full moon 90 degrees away and some thin haze I must have been 
mad but here it is!

For the first time in months the gremlins hit the camera and I had trouble locating the field but eventually I started 
taking 1 minute subs. I re-checked the ephemeris and realised the asteroid would be swamped behind the light of a 12th 
magnitude star so I continued taking subs until I thought it would be clear of the star. I kept seeing fleeting glimpses 
of what might have been an image but it was 4 in the morning - was it just noise in the image?
After processing the images and stacking 6 frames at a time most of the stacks clearly showed 'The Sky At Night'. The 
annotated image below was taken between 03:23 and 03:27UT and is a stack of 6x1min unfiltered subs. The animation shows the motion between 02:48 and 03:47UT. The astrometric position measured with 'Astrometrica' matches very well with the position from JPL Horizons for 03:25UT. All images taken with the 14" unfiltered at f5.24 and the Art 285 CCD camera.

Astrometry