Vesta is an asteroid measuring approximately 525km across. It’s located within the asteroid belt, which is between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Vesta’s average speed is 19.4km/sec, so in this animation it travels over 6.5 million km.
I was checking Stellarium to choose the next target to image and noticed that Vesta was in a convenient patch of sky. This asteroid is bright enough that it shines through even light polluted city skies. It moves fairly speedily compared to the background stars, so if I could get images of it over a few consecutive nights I’d have enough material for an animation.
The weather was pretty bad, but there were enough gaps in the cloud to get at least one 120-second sub each night. To get the framing right I noted the the RA/DEC of the asteroid’s location in the middle of my predicted five-day run, then used my ASIAIR PRO to move my telescope to those coordinates each night. This made alignment quite easy.
Actually identifying Vesta was quite tricky though. I used the Blink function in PixInsight to quickly flick through the images in order to spot the one dot that was moving relative to the others. In the end I needed to crop in quite tight for the final images — although Vesta is speedy, a 400mm telescope and APS-C camera sensor easily captured it over five nights with plenty of room to spare.
* 29 March – 2 April 2021
* Bristol, UK (Bortle 8)
* Telescope: Askar FRA400 f/5.6 Quintuplet APO Astrograph
* Camera: ZWO ASI 2600MC-PRO
* Mount: Orion Sirius EQ-G
* Guide: William Optics 32mm; ZWO ASI 120MM Mini
* Software: PixInsight, Photoshop, Lightroom, ezgif.com
* Control: ASIAIR PRO
By Lee Pullen
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