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Old 27-03-2009, 02:48 PM
Dennis
Dazzled by the Cosmos.

Dennis is offline
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Brisbane
Posts: 11,704
Near Earth Asteroid 2009 FD - whilst you were sleeping!

Space, what a busy place! Whilst grabbing some 60 second exposures of Asteroid 2009 FD on its 1.6LD race-by-rendezvous with our Earth environment, I also recorded 3 even faster moving objects, their ghostly trails appearing as fleeting tracks on my CCD camera.

The “short dashes” are the path of Asteroid 2009 FD, each “dash” being a 60 second exposure. The longer trails are probably satellites, as their paths are “punctuated” by the download time of each frame. And I thought we lived in a quiet neighbourhood! I felt privileged to be outside watching all the early morning action, whilst all around me, everyone lay sound asleep.

Brisbane, Qld, Australia, 27th March 2009
01:41am to 02:17am AEST (UT+10)
Vixen ED102mm F9 refractor
SBIG ST7 CCD camera, 18x60 sec exposures

FOV 25’ 45” x 17’ 09” at an image scale of 2.02 arcsec/pixel

Cheers

Dennis

PS – I have an animation but I can’t upload it, as our desktop PC is dead and I’m working on a older laptop with a very limited set of software tools!

EDIT:
Hah – managed to navigate to our backups on the network storage drive and located my ftp application, installation instructions and upload instructions! Oh the joy of backups when your computer dies on you!

WARNING: 1.0MB file. 2009FD animation
Attached Thumbnails
Click for full-size image (NEO 2009_FD Text.jpg)
70.1 KB196 views

Last edited by Dennis; 05-04-2009 at 06:06 PM. Reason: Animation updated with version that includes satellite labels.
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