Asteroid Vesta

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Thought I'd do a bit of Asteroid hunting for something different. Currently the brightest asteroid is Vesta at magnitude 6.4 in the constellation of Virgo. Close by is Ceres, which I didn't get around to.

I had trouble finding it using Stellarium, which seems to have the wrong coordinates, so I used The Sky Live. http://theskylive.com/vesta-tracker

My original evil plan was to capture a trail from it, but at present it moves too slow for all but the longest exposures, so had to take a frame 1 day apart. One day I'll figure out how to animate it, but for now it's just plain frames.

Taken on May 23 and May 24, 6" F5 Newtonian, 10 x 30 seconds each, Pentax K-x.

[astro744]

We'll done! You're all to generous by adding the arrow for us to spot it. What you should have done is make us blink the images and see what moves.. This works well to with the two images you provided.

We'll done again!

[anthony.tony]

Nice Shots. Tony.

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Thanks '744 and Tony. Asteroid hunting is something I can do in moonlight, so will be something to keep me busy when the sky is too bright for deep sky.