Hello,
A couple of nights ago, I mounted the 5D Mk III with 50mm F1.4 lens on my equatorial mount and let it chug along to take 20 x 60 second exposures of a chunk of sky that included Mars, Porrima and Spica. We are only some 6kms from the Brisbane CBD and the camera was pointing into the dome of light pollution from the city, so the result was a horrible image, as seen in #1. The FOV is approx. 40 x 26 degrees.
After some extensive processing, I managed to rescue most of the image as seen in #2. After checking The Sky X Pro, I noticed that I had bagged several asteroids as identified and labelled in #3.
Image #5 is a full res crop of the region shown by the white rectangle in the full field image shown in #4.
Finally, if I had gone to a dark sky site and gone deeper on the exposure, I might have captured something like the cosmic scene as portrayed by The Sky X Pro seen in #6. A veritable plethora of Asteroids.
I am in absolute awe of the skills and dedication of the early astronomers who first predicted, then discovered these mysterious bodies, without DSLR’s, Planetarium Programs and GoTo mounts! I do envy their dark skies though!
Ceres (now a Dwarf Planet) was discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi, a monk in Sicily, on 1st January 1801 and has a diameter of 960 x 932 with a rotation period of 9.075 hours and an orbital period of 4.60 years at a distance of 2.767AU. Over the next few years, three other objects were discovered in a roughly similar orbit; Pallas in 1802, Juno in 1804 and Vesta in 1807. Vesta is one of the largest asteroids in the Solar System, with a mean diameter of 525 kilometres. It was discovered by Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers on 29 March 1807.
Image #7 is a screen capture from Astrometry.net showing the coordinates of the centre of the field.
Cheers
Dennis
