Well, what a night at the office! It started off with broken clouds which then thinned out around 1:00am, Monday morning. Comet Schwassmann-Wassmann 73P was above the tree line towards the East, so I grabbed 20 x 3 min exposures and sure enough, the movement against the background stars was noticeable.
Feeling confident, I waited until Asteroid 2004 XP14 cleared the tree line, around 5:00am, and then the fun and games really started. This fella was motoring along; and I mean motoring!
I tried to predict the path in The Sky Pro 6 and then slew the ‘scope a couple of minutes ahead and grab a quick frame to check the field stars against The Sky Pro 6 and then take a 20 sec exposure to see what turned up. Well, I was blown away that on the first attempt, there was a faint but distinct trail so I exposed another frame at 20 secs and grabbed XP14 just towards the edge.
I leap frogged again and grabbed a quick reference frame but it didn’t look like the field stars in The Sky. Stop for a quick sync on a nearby bright star (via the finder scope) and slew to XP14 again, pray and grab a 30 sec shot. Bingo! There he/she was again, so another 30 sec image followed before XP14 darted off the screen.
Clouds and dawn were hovering around so I repeated the exercise another 3 times but only managed one more hit, this time at 60 secs. Wow, I was just not prepared for how fast XP14 was moving.
Anyhow, here are the results.
Vixen 102mm f9 refractor, SBIG ST7E ccd camera. Two frames stacked, 30 secs duration each frame.
Acquired via CCDSoft5.
Process in MIRA AP.
Finished in Corel PhotoPaint 12
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