Hello,
Last night, 13th March, I set up to capture the trail of Near Earth Asteroid 1620 Geographos, a 5x2km lump of rock due to approach Earth within 12 million miles.
Some thin high cloud made it a more challenging task, and I lost a couple of frames due to temporary cloud cover. I also had some fogging on the CCD as I haven’t used it in a while and the desiccant needs baking to remove the moisture from the imaging chamber. Anyhow, after a few gremlins, variable quality frames, tracking problems and some operator clumsiness, here is a composite image showing the trail after I re-acquired the asteroid from one of the cloud outages.
Here is an complete
animation of 1620 Geographos, a 5 X 2km sized asteroid, captured from Brisbane on 13th March 2008, between 9:52 and 11:09 pm AEST (GMT+10).
WARNING: 740kB
There are 45 frames in the sequence. Each frame was exposed for 60 seconds with a 20 second delay between frames, clearly showing 1620 Geographos silently flitting between the fixed stars, whilst most people were safe in their beds, blissfully oblivious to the celestial drama being played out as they slept the night away.
Thin, high clouds affected some of the frames, contributing to the dimming of some fainter stars which shows as a “blinking” effect. Takahashi Mewlon 180 at F9.6 with an ST7E CCD camera. FOV 14x9 arc mins approx. Chip is a massive 765x510 pixels. Oh, and its B&W!
Cheers
Dennis
PS – Oh, and here is a rather small Saturn I managed grab between clouds.