Animation of Vesta and Ceres

[StephenM]

Hi all,

Here's an animation showing the motion of dwarf planet Ceres and minor planet Vesta against the background stars, over 3 consecutive nights this week. The bright blue star near the top of the frame is Zeta Virginis.

Vesta and Ceres will continue to move closer to each other up until 5th July, when they will be just 10 arc secs apart.

Each frame of this animation is an image obtained by stacking 10x2 sec exposures (taken with my Canon 50D and Tamron 90mm macro lens at f/2.8 and 1600 iso) using DeepSkyStacker.

The 1.6 meg animation can be seen here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stephenmudge/14521304934/sizes/o/

Thanks for looking!

Cheers,
Stephen

[cometcatcher]

That's great!

[StephenM]

Thanks Kevin!

[colinmlegg]

Nice work Stephen. I was hoping to do similar over the next few nights but cloud is going to kill me. Maybe next Wednesday?

[blink138]

very clever stephen!
pat

[acarleton]

Great work, you beat me to it. i started taking shots of this last night

[StephenM]

Thanks Colin, Pat and aidan!

I'm hoping to get another set of images tonight, and will then post a 6-day animation.

Cheers,
Stephen

[h0ughy]

awesome results