Well, I didnt go out to Stargate, but I successfully found and tracked the asteroid. It took me about an hour to find, because finding a slowly-moving dot in a pile of dots is a little challenging. The way I finally found it was to print out a full-page inverted-color (black on white) astrophoto of the star cluster, sketch the path of the asteroid through, and look for stars that werent on the charts that the asteroid would go near. I memorized the starfield around the bright star it was passing closest to and waited until 1 AM, when it entered the field. It was brighter than I expected, and really moving quickly. And yet I could barely tell it was moving while staring into the eyepiece, for the simple fact that the whole starfield was moving perpendicular to the asteroid in my eyepiece. A tracking scope would have helped a lot. Did you see the asteroid? What did you think? (JK) Bonus: This asteroid was imaged with radar and shown to have a moon!! This photo (?) is animated.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 12:51:44 +0000
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