Petri Kehusmaa Astroblog

On 19./20.03.2008 I observed several main belt asteroids to report astrometry to Minor Planet Center (MPC). Obviously the data was good enough because MPC rewarded me with my own observatory code (B64)! Here are few animations from that night.

Yesterday I received an alert from SWIFT satellite that a very bright gamma ray burst is visible. This is the initial alert:

GCN/SWIFT-BAT
GRB Position
RA=218.010 DEC=+36.267d
ERR=3.00arcmin
T=06:12:49.25 UT
I=187.56
R_Signif=206.72
I_Signif=22.50
GRB, Not_in_on-board_cat.
Not_in_gnd_cat.
R_trig, Pnt_src,

To my bad luck I only checked my email at 01:00am when this GRB was dimmed to mag 19. I tried to reach for it but couldn’t catch it with my 8 inch SCT. Anyway I reported my negative GRB observation to AAVSO.

This is the GRB field at the time of it’s burst. Limiting magnitude is 17.6. Red circle indicates the location of the gamma ray burst.

There were still some unprocessed images on hard disk. These frames were taken on 5th of Jan. There is total of 50 minutes of Ha data.