Petri Kehusmaa Astroblog

Last night I continued testing automated session with CCDAutopilot. Target was asteroid 133 Cyrene. This is data for more than 4 hours. Individual exposure 2 minutes and 103 data points.

I decided to have this asteroid for my target when testing CCDAutopilot. This session was fully automated for almost 4 hours (I was a sleep when session ended). Everything went well and here is the result. There is a sum image where asteroid movement is visible and lightcurve to see variations of reflected sunlight from asteroid’s surface.

Marked in image is minor planet (721) Tabora. I found it with Visual PinPoint and actually there were three minor planets in a same field of view with Leo trio!

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.