Hello,
In the dim outer reaches of our solar system, I am still trying to obtain a satisfactory image of the Minor Planet (50000) Quaoar. I had an opportunity to set up on Friday and grab 3 x 15 min frames in between clouds, although Quaoar was uncomfortably close to a blazingly bright mag 16.68 star, which made the job of digging it out of the data that much more challenging.
Although I am confident that a have a good candidate for Quaoar, it would be nice to grab another image once it has moved on, to a less densely populated region, over the next week or so.
Quaoar lies a billion kilometers beyond Pluto and is a Magnitude 18.99 Minor Planet classified as a Trans-Neptunian Object.
- Orbit Period: 284.9 years
- Earth Distance: 42.2 AU
- Sun Distance: 43.1 AU
- Perihelion Distance: 41.6 AU
- Aphelion Distance: 45.0 AU
- Diameter: 560 - 1800 km
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news...7oct_newworld/
- The 1st frame is a re-sampled view from the ST2000XM 1600x1200 original down to 800x600.
- The 2nd frame is an inverted image of the 1st frame.
- The 3rd frame displays a 10x10 arcmin overlay obtained from the US Naval Observatory Precision Measuring Machine Data Archive at http://www.nofs.navy.mil/
- The 4th frame is a crop of the region containing Quoar with the USNO chart as an overlay.
- The 5th frame is an enlarged crop of the region showing Quaoar.
- The 6th frame is a screen capture from The SkyX Pro showing the calculated position of Quaoar.
Thanks for looking!
Cheers
Dennis