Near Earth asteroid. How to identify?

[Stefan Buda]

Friday night I was taking 5min subs of M33 and after midnight a rather bright object started marching across the 2x3 degree field. It took more than an hour to cross the 3 degree wide field.
I could not find any known asteroids using Cartes du Ciel.
Spaceweather.com has a list of current Earth approach asteroids but I could not find one that matched my data, and I can't think of any satellite orbit that could explain the observation. It was moving way too slow for any Earth orbit object and way too fast for a distant asteroid.
Closest approach to M33 was at 12:55AEST (13:55UT).

Can anyone help me track down this object?

[Ryderscope]

Hi Stefan, I recently went through this with an image of mine where I was able to identify an asteroid using the Annotate Image option in Pixinsight. See post in the Deep Space forum here (https://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=212328).

If you don’t use Pixinsight, the other option is the Minor Planet Checker (https://minorplanetcenter.net/cgi-bin/checkmp.cgi) on the Minor Planet Centre web site. The site needs the specific details of the object sighting re: dates/times/location/search radius etc. and will bring up a list of known objects at those coordinates.

Adam Block has a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-iKRhtgWpw) on this which goes through using Pixinsight and also using the minor planet centre. The minor planet centre discussion is at the 10’ 50” point in the video. Note that this video is three years old so the Pixinsight description is out of date. It refers to having to update custom data files but I found with the most recent version this was not necessary. I simply selected the Asteroid option and it quickly identified the object.

Hope that helps.

CS,
Rodney

[Stefan Buda]

Thanks Rodney,
I tried the MPC site and it found a couple of objects within about one degree but they were too faint and moving way too slowly.

[Ryderscope]

New discovery maybe ;)

[Stefan Buda]

I don't think so. A near Earth asteroid this bright would have sounded alarm bells on astro news sites.
I did a maximum stack of all the subs in DSS and now I'm inclined to think that it was not an asteroid as I found a second, much fainter, object that took about 12 minutes to cross the field.
It is still a mystery though. Geosynchronous satellites move at 15 degrees per hour against the starry background and the Moon at about 0.5 degrees per hour.
So for any space junk to move at about 3 degrees per hour, it would have to orbit the earth well beyond the geostationary distance. And that begs the question of what can look so bright from such a distance. I suppose the second, fainter, object could be a discarded piece of space junk moving somewhat beyond geosynchronous orbit.

[OzEclipse]

I checked 2024 PT5. It was up near the NCP on Friday night and much further out, 0.02AU.
Joe

[Stefan Buda]

And magnitude 19. Way too faint.

Maybe a discarded rocket stage on a lunar transfer orbit could be the explanation?