Some clear skies in Brisbane beckoned, albeit in the teeth of a bitterly cold weather front courtesy of the southern polar air stream which also pushed strong SW winds ahead of it. I set up in a sheltered spot to avoid the hammering gusts and began my search for NEO 2014 HO132, a small (32 metre) lump of rock due to make a 2.1 Lunar Distance close approach within the next 24 hours.
I had a few problems locating the faint rock due to slight differences in my site location but once I locked in the GPS coordinates of our back yard I was away. The NEO crawled slowly across my screen as displayed in The Sky X pro, in real time, so this piece of space rock was really motoring along, not too far-off our home planet.
The relative dimness (mag 16.6) and rapid movement only delivered a handful of photons to my sensor and for each exposure, these scant droplets of light were smeared out over its 5 minute long path, resulting in a very dim trail that I had to really dig out with post capture processing.
I took 5 frames in all and here are two of the more distinct trails, although even these have been slightly enhanced to lift them above the light polluted background skies of Brisbane.
The brightish star at the centre of the 800x600 crop is GSC 5553:43 at Magnitude: 12.01, located at RA (2000.0): 13h 55m 39s and Dec (2000.0): -07° 33' 35" in the Constellation of Virgo.
The Sky X Pro provided the following details for 2014 HO132 as at the time and date of my imaging session.
Object Name: 2014 HO132
Object Type: Asteroid (Small Database)
RA (Topocentric): 13h 56m 04.06s
Dec (Topocentric): -07° 38' 38.01"
Magnitude: 16.60
Rise Time: 16:41
Earth Distance (au): 0.01
Sun Distance (au): 1.02
RA Rate (arcsecs/sec): 0.261230
Dec Rate (arcsecs/sec): -0.494532
Date: 3/05/2014
Time: 11:13:13 PM STD
Constellation: Virgo
Celestron C9.25 with x0.63 Reducer
SBIG ST2000XM CCD camera
5 minute frames x 2
Cheers
Dennis
