Weather permitting, I'll be giving this a go. Forecast is not too good (Brisbane) for Saturday, Sunday or Monday, but improving Tuesday when the asteroid will have passed its closest point, but be at a greater altitude in our Southern skies.
The ephemeris is available at http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/Ephem...l/K06V02V.html
I will plug it into skymap tonight when I get home to produce a local map. If you want I could then post that map but it is pretty easy to do yourself.
Here is a chart from SkyTools for 1st April 2007. SkyTools is a very feature and function rich application for observation planning, charting, and logging. This example is a Naked Eye – Finder – Eyepiece Chart for my Mewlon 180.
The Binary Asteroid Survey I am part of has been monitoring this one (photometrically) for a while now. It's going to be moving quite fast to image anything (other than usuing stack and track ion very short integrations) until around 5th/6th April when at mag 12/13.
Here are a couple of my previous efforts for (4179) Toutatis and 2004 XP14; the latter was a very, very tough capture - I was incredibly lucky to record anything at, all given its speed, an obstructed horizon, the incoming dawn and approaching clouds.
I imaged toutatis in 2004. Each exposure was about 20 secs with download time between the exposures~20 sec gap. The field is 13x 9 arcmins. It was fairly zooming across the field.
Looking good here tonight, although the moon may cause a few headaches, I will also have to setup in a different position as the neighbors tree i smack bang in the path area.
Here is a SkyTools three panel chart for tonight (Sat 31st March). It appears that the altitude of 2006 VV2 peaks around 21:48 pm AEST, some 42 degrees above the horizon. Magnitude 10.1
Been outside since 7:30pm and its now almost 9:30pm and so far nothing, rien, zip, zilch, nadda. Didn’t even get to polar align using the Polar Alignment Scope through the sucker holes – oh well, at least I’ll get my beauty sleep (and lord only knows, I need it!) and live to try again tomorrow, and the day after…..
Taking 10 pics @ 2mins each atm, guiding on a close 7th mag star. For some reason pics are turning out red and there is a weird reflection in it, might be because the moon is only 18degrees away, but I did increase the size of the dew shield
My mount disconnected itself from the laptop part way through the exposures, the guidestar I was using went for a wander and then went MIA. The shutter on the camera wasnt working (DSLR shutter problem) So all up, I learnt you dont walk away from your equipment until you are 100% happy its working LOL. Still dont know what the loopy thing is on the image.
My mount disconnected itself from the laptop part way through the exposures, the guidestar I was using went for a wander and then went MIA. The shutter on the camera wasnt working (DSLR shutter problem) So all up, I learnt you dont walk away from your equipment until you are 100% happy its working LOL. Still dont know what the loopy thing is on the image.
Andrew,
Regardless of all the difficulties you had, I can still see how the Asteroid moved among the stars!!! Good work, even though Murphy had a field day
P.S. The blurry white thing is the Giant Fish Nebula
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