Hello,
Thanks for the nice words and the clever, symbolic message Ving and thanks to H0ughy for explaining it to me – I was a bit slow on the uptake!
Thanks also Dave for your efforts with Star Atlas pro – I must look further into this amazing program.
In the end, I sat down and err…read the manual. CCDSoft (camera control and image capture program) and The Sky Pro 6 actually integrate together and found the asteroid for me, labelled it, and also identified another one that I should have picked up but somehow missed.
Here are some screen prints showing some of the steps. Basically, CCDSoft knows the RA and DEC coordinates of the image and so it launches The Sky and performs an image overlay. I already knew this and had used it to identify field stars, but I did not realise that I could also perform an asteroid search as well. I downloaded the asteroid database (88M download) from the IAU Minor Planet Center at:
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/mpc.html
and then loaded this into The Sky. The Sky then plotted (with green circles) the positions of asteroids in my image – really neat eh! In the meantime, I had also visited the JPL Small-Body Database Browser at:
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi
to find a list of potential candidates. Anyhow, the final result identifies this interloper as Asteroid 116200 (2003 XY14) discovered on 15 Dec 2003. There was another asteroid in the FOV also, 81407 (2000 GO88), but I didn’t record it at mag 18.5 – not sure why?
Cheers
Dennis