IMAGES: Asteroid 1998 QE2

IMAGE: Asteroid 1998 QE2

EQUIPMENT: Meade LXD-55 6" Refractor with Canon Digital Rebel XT at prime focus. 

NOTES: A series of unguided 30 second shots at ISO 1600.

A FEW THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE ANIMATED GIF.

- This is a series of 36 frames showing movement of the asteroid. The asteroid, though point like in nature, looks like a peanut or worm in each frame because it has traveled that far in the 30 seconds it took to image it, leaving a small trail.

- Equipment used: 6 inch Meade LXD-55 refractor, Canon Digital Rebel at prime focus.

- Each frame is a 30 second unguided exposure stored by the camera in jpg format.

- The time span where the asteroid crosses the field of view in the GIF from "point A" to "point B" spans about 20 minutes of actual observing time.

- The GIF was made from the original jpg frames. No special processing was done to improve image quality.

- The stars in the frames are not always pinpoint like they should be. This is a realization of the errors in the telescopes unguided tracking drive.

- There are tiny "dancing" red and blue specs. These are hot pixels in the camera's imaging sensor. Again, no processing was used to "clean up" the frames.

- The asteroid appears to wiggle like a worm across the field of view. This may very well be a real phenomena unique to this asteroid but I am not sure what causes it. I am trying to get observations from guided scopes to check it out. *It is known that the asteroid has a moon with an orbit of 32 hours and that the asteroid itself rotates once about every 4 hours or so. A combination of these two characteristics may change the way light reflects from both the moon and the asteroid, creating an illusion of a "wiggling worm" in trail shots like this.

- IMPORTANT: Sometimes the asteroid trail seems to take a "vertical dip". This is a product of the tracking errors in the telescopes unguided tracking drive.

*Post observation blog addition.