50 minutes of imaging and i got to around 19 magnitude for this faint asteroid; this is in Ic band though. SNR is low but detectable. This asteroid was discovered some two weeks ago.
My 300th observation of Near Earth Asteroids
Near Earth Asteroids are the ones whose orbits come very close to the orbit of planet Earth. Astronomers want to keep an eye on these objects all the time and since they cannot do it, amateur astronomers happily do that for them. As of today, there are 24,158 Near Earth Asteroids known to us.
For the last few months, I have been actively involved in the follow-up observations of Near Earth Asteroids from my observatory (N31) and as far as I know, this is the only observatory which is observing NEA from Pakistan.
The following picture is the stacked image of 100 NEA 2013 PY6 images, which I observed at around 17 magnitude. The three straight lines are the lights of an airplane, which crossed the field of view of the telescope.
You can see how many asteroids are in fact in the field of view
And this is the orbit (in Grey) of this Near Earth Asteroid.
Near Earth Object - Asteroid 1984 QY1 Observed
Minor Planet Center shows a list of Asteroids (Figure 1) in need of observations. A few days ago, I saw the list and there was this asteroid 1984 QY1 which observation was “desirable”. It was not that dim at magnitude 16 so i had to observe it.
Figure 1. Minor Planet Center’s generated list of targets near a position i selected
With unguided 60 seconds of sub exposures, i recorded it at 16.4 magnitude (Figure 2). Figure 3 shows the stacked image where the asteroid is right where it is supposed to be.
Figure 2. 1984 QY1 observed at magnitude 16.1
Figure 3. In stacked image, position of 1984 QY1 is shown in red box
Famous Asteroid 433 Eros
Asteroid 433 Eros is famous because in 1998 Space Probe NEAR Shoemaker visited it and gave us stunning views of this asteroid.
The above image is a stack of 263 images; each image was of 5 seconds exposure in luminance filter. Telescope was being tracked but not guided. The Asteroid was moving from right side of this image to left. The time of image acquisition was 30 minutes.
Top right has a beautiful close visual binary star which are almost 9 arcseconds distant from each other and both have about 7 magnitude brightness. Hipparchus Star Catalogue has it with an entry as HIP 21108.