Hello,
Here is my second attempt at recording Nereid, the outermost known moon of Neptune from its discovery in 1949 (by G. Kuiper) until 2002. The mean radius of Nereid is 170km and it has a magnitude of 18.72. The orbital period of Nereid is listed as 360.13619 days and its highly eccentric orbit helped keep the much brighter Neptune (7.83m) outside the field of view.
Using the NASA (JPL)
Horizons system, I generated an ephemeris for the 15th August 2009 at 1 hour intervals and then slewed the ‘scope to the coordinates generated by Horizons.
The parent planet Neptune (diameter 49,528.0 km) lies some 2.796 billion miles from the Sun and has a rather chilly surface temperature of -209°C.
The attached image shows Nereid in the bottom left hand corner with an inverted inset to better show the motion trail over the 7 x 20 minute exposures. I have also included an inverted image and animation revealing Nereid’s movement over some 140 minutes.
Cheers
Dennis