Last night I shot a series of 110 5" exposures as it crossed my 18 arc minute tall FOV. It was pretty faint but I'm still going to try to create another animation. It's well placed for imaging again tonight. Hopefully brighter although moving faster. And it looks like the weather may cooperate (Clear Sky Clock says the band of clouds passing overhead now will soon be gone). patrick On 08 Apr 2010, at 18:25, Canopus56 wrote:
I downloaded "The Sky" asteriod element line for 2010 GA6 from the MPC-NEO ephemeris web application and ran tonight's path through a planetarium program for a Salt Lake City observing location.
In terms of balancing findability (passing near something) and altitude, at 2010-4-8 22:55 this fast-mover (1/10th degree per minute) will be within one degree, celestial south of 5th magnitude star HR 1686 (HD 33564, SAO 5496). HR1686 does not have a Flamsteed number but is on a line along the tail of the Little Dipper, through Polaris about 15 degrees from Polaris. It is a relatively featureless part of Cam. At 22:55pm MDT, 2010 GA6 will be at 345d2m az, alt 42d.1m. J2000 RA: 5h24m41.75s DE:+78°55'42.4"
In terms of passing an object of interest, at 2010-4-9 3:07MDT will pass almost directly over (within 2 to three arcminutes) of bright neb NGC40 in Cep. At that time, NGC40 and 2010 GA6 will only be at 26d32m alt, and az 12d09'.
Resetting my planetarium program's observatory position for Wiggins Obs, the position and passing time for NGC40 is not significantly different.
Backplotting the 3:00 MDT position by running a high accuracy back plot at that time using the MPC-NEO ephemeris service results in a position very near NGC40 and that is consistent with my planetarium program plot result.
I won't be going after this myself, as it is too faint for a after-work urban location.
Clear Skies, Kurt
The Sky Asteriods.dat line (you'll have to fix the line wrapping error before pasting it into your Asteriods.dat file) -
2010 GA6 |2010 07 23.000|0.592756 |2.313974| 9.8259|198.1731 | 33.4022 | 2000| 22.3594 |25.6 | 0.15| 0.00