Last night, the NEO 2016 HP6 paid a visit to the Brisbane skies, gliding silently by whilst the city slept soundly, a close encounter at approx. 2.2 Lunar Distance.
To acquire the object, I had to leap frog the telescope ahead of the NEO as it crawled across the computer screen, in the simulated real time view of my planetarium program, The Sky X Pro.
I took a series of 60 sec exposures and it less than 9 frames, the impression created by the smattering of photons from the dim mag 15 object, exited the field of view.
Equipment details:
Tak Mewlon 210 F11.5
Tak x0.8 Reducer
Atik 414EX camera
Image details:
Centre (RA, hms): 14h 33m 49.005s
Centre (Dec, dms): -19° 33' 33.091"
FOV Size: 10.5 x 10.5 arcmin
Pixel scale: 0.67 arcsec/pixel
I was left wondering, should I have targeted Jupiter instead - so many objects to image, so little time.
Cheers
Dennis
