[Dennis]

Originally Posted by andyc

That's an excellent catch Dennis! Makes my imaging of Haumea and Makemake look easy by comparison - this is a good bit fainter and against a very crowded star field. Very impressed you got this, you're inspiring me to have a go

Originally Posted by rally

Thanks Dennis
Great stuff

Originally Posted by Retrograde

This is a phenomenal pick-up. Well done!

Originally Posted by multiweb

I was looking at this the other night and it's still slowly sinking in. That's a bloody long way from home and the fact you've located and managed to image this is nothing short of amazing. Talk about finding a needle in a haystack.

Thanks Andy, Rally, Pete & Marc, I appreciate your comments.

@Andy – good luck with the hunt, I find these projects to be quite a bit of fun and not too intense.

@Marc – I used both The Sky X Pro and SkyTools 3 Pro to establish the predicted position and a GoTo found the field quite easily, although it was a little busy. As I watched the 60 sec frames being downloaded I could see that some were very tight in terms of clear, round stars, whilst others had seeing/guiding/cloud artefacts that made them slightly less tight than those good frames.

On the good frames the pin prick of Quaoar was quite distinct, whereas on the slightly less perfect frames, it was more of a diffuse clump of photons rather than a distinct point.

On that point, I often find that if the fainter NEO’s move too quickly, their photon trail becomes too diffuse to be recorded as they become spread out over too many pixels, whereas stars that are much fainter are easily captured as their photons accumulate on the same pixels of the imaging chip.

Cheers

Dennis