Trying for Vesta tonight

[Thefatkitty]

Hi all, hope you're well and your weather is good.

I got up this morning to snow and my phone going off with an alert message. It was from the kind folks at the Weather Network. No offense to them, but 1/2 inch of snow is not Armageddon, folks... So I turned off notifications for that app.

In checking the forecast, the snow is supposed to stop, the temps will go below freezing, and the sky will be clear at about 10PM. Looking out my window now this may seem highly unlikely, but experience has taught me that the sky often clears after the snow leaves and the temps plummet. So I hold out hope....

Ol' Luna will be in the west by then; i'll probably try my 60mm again. I got some great shots Tuesday, but tonight is supposed to be even clearer. And in the south east, Vesta will be drifting by the last star in the left (?) horn of Taurus; the star labeled 1 Tau. This should make it an easy target for even me to find.

I should be able to see it in my 10". What I would like to try is photographing it. Now, I don't have a tracking mount (just my older CG4), but I've found that with some practice, I can manually track and object for 16 seconds; that's my record with no blurry stars. Anywhere from 5 - 10 seconds is actually fairly easy. However, the scope I use is a homemade 60mm f/7 achro. With Vesta being at Mag 6.7, I should be able to get it in there... Again, I hope.

Now I do have a question. If I manage to get it in a picture at 11PM or so, would Vesta have moved enough so that if I took more pics at say 4AM, it would be noticeable against the other stars?
I ask because Friday night is not looking good so far

As for the scope and the manual tracking, it works, but the resulting stack is better in black and white. This is the Pleiades with 2 pics at 16 secs and one at 10 secs. There are magnitude 7+ stars in there that are visible, so I'm hoping this sort of thing will be good enough for what I want to try tonight. But Vesta is a pretty small target, so I don't know....

Pleiades_DSS_2X16sec_1X13sec.png

If anyone has any advice on this sort of thing, I'd love to hear it

Thanks and all the best,

[yobbo89]

yes indeed, a hard target to tease out , i've tried and failed to find it.

[Lady Fraktor]

Good luck with the attempt Mark

[helicon]

Good luck Mark. Hope you are successful. I've never seen Vesta. Oh wait, yes I have on this coin of Nero. But I have never seen the asteroid.

[goldstar]

A quick look in Stellarium , and if I have done the arithmetic correctly, tells me that Vesta will have moved by about 27 arc secs from 19h00 to 5h00 ( delta 10 hrs).
Not a huge amount but detectable if there are enough fainter stars around to gauge it by, but there are not. The brightest, closest star in the field looks to be about mag 11 and with ole' Lunar up this will be a tough proposition.
I selected a 1/2 degree field and even a larger field will not reveal anything brighter unless you go to 2 degree field to include Omicron Tauri at 3.6 mag.
At this scale you will definitely be pixel counting to see any movement.
Still, I think worth trying and good luck.

[Makuser]

Hi Mark. You are off to a good start. to stack two time lapse images and then show the movement of Vesta is not easy. Although asteroids always intrigue me, I have always failed at this, mostly due my poor skies on the second image attempt. The very best of wishes on your Vesta astrophotography project Mark, so keep us posted and the kindest of regards.

[Thefatkitty]

Hi all, thanks for the advice and well-wishes, much appreciated.

Unfortunately, the weather here did not cooperate. I stayed up until 1AM, hoping in vain for a break. I did make the discovery that the roof of my shed leaks in heavy rain, so that gave me something to do last night. Two words: Automotive tar

I would have tried this again last night, but ol' Luna had other ideas, and the sky wasn't really that clear as well. Between the Moon glow and the not-so-transparent sky, just finding Tau 1 & 2 was a trick. All I got accomplished was some pics of the moon through some old scopes. Not the outing I wanted, but an outing, nonetheless. Plus the wind helped blow the dust off my f/15 80mm....

My long range forecast is for rain and snow, possibly lasting forever But I do hold out hope. On the last day of this month, Vesta will be about 1 degree away from Menkab in the constellation Cetus. I'll get it yet....!!!

Thanks again all, and have a great weekend

[Lady Fraktor]

Hopefully success on the next attempt Mark