"Haumea (formerly known as 2003 EL61) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt. Its mass is one-third the mass of Pluto. It was discovered in 2004 by a team headed by Mike Brown of Caltech at the Palomar Observatory in the United States and, in 2005, by a team headed by J. L. Ortiz at the Sierra Nevada Observatory in Spain, though the latter claim has been contested.
Haumea sits among the trans-Neptunian objects, a vast ring of distant cold and rocky bodies in the outer Solar System. At this moment it is roughly 50 times the Sun-Earth distance from the Sun, but at its closest the elliptical orbit of Haumea brings it 35 times the Sun-Earth distance from our star.
Haumea satisfies the requirements for membership in the club of dwarf planets, so it is now the fifth dwarf planet in the solar system, joining Pluto, Ceres, Eris, and Makemake. On September 17, 2008, it was accepted as a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and named after Haumea, the Hawaiian goddess of childbirth. Haumea's extreme elongation makes it the fastest spinning object in the Solar System, and unique among known trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs)."
My neighbour came over during the early part of the evening and seemed quite nonplussed about my project – I guess that to non-astronomers, a few white dots and a blinking spot on a screen doesn’t really amount to much!
I think that the orbital period of Haumea is some 238 years so the motion recorded is predominantly that of the Earth in its annual orbit around the Sun.
Sorry Dennis, slip of the brain!
