Asteroids 6-Hebe and 15-Eunomia
Main belt asteroids 6-Hebe and 15-Eunomia are currently in the constellation Capricornus. Both are bright (visual mag 8.2 and 8.8 respectively) and easy to find by comparison with a star chart. (Asteroid 1-Ceres is also in Capricornus but is too low behind my neighbors trees).
Equipment used was Celestron Nexstar11 telescope, F3.3 focal reducer, and Astrovid StellacamII video camera (9/14 gain, integrate 128, medium gamma). Dark subtracted, flat field and bias corrected with ImagePlus. Aligned and stacked with Registax3, brightness adjusted, crop, and animation created with Photoshop Elements2. Sky was clear; temperature was 60°F; turbulence was 5/10; transparency was very good; location was Louisville, CO;
August 25th, 2006 at 2:43 am
Hi Vern,
Just curious,what was your exposures?.I was wondering if you could detect any movement.
Andrew
August 25th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
The Stellacam2 was set to integrate 128 1/30 second exposures, so about 4 seconds — way more exposure than necessary. I kept them at 4 seconds to match up with the darks I took that evening. Logic of doing that was probably wrong — the asteroid was bright enough that no dark subtraction was probably necessary. An integration of 16 1/30 sec frames or about 1/2 second would have been a better exposure. I didn\’t notice any visible movement of the asteroid while taking the images. The field matched up with the star chart, so it was obvious what was the asteroid.