How did I identify an Asteroid that didn't show up in any (regular) software?
At the 22nd of April 2020 I was still collecting more data of M51. Due to my Backyard's surrounding of trees and houses, I have to plan my imaging session very carefully. But finally, around midnight Virgo emerged behind the trees. At this point, I still had to make a decision which target it was going to be. Siamese Twins, a set of unbarred spiral galaxies at a distance of 59.4 million light years, had been on my list for a very long time and seeing conditions were good. The decision was made :).
Prior that week I had already programmed the object in Sequence Generator Pro using the Mosaic Wizard, this feature gives a good representation of the field of view and which galaxies you could also catch in the same shot. Composition at its best :).
Now all I had to do was click ‘Center object’ and let the software do the rest. It essentially slews the mount to the target, makes a short exposure picture, Platesolves it and repoints the telescope exactly on target where it needs to be. Platesolving is a very powerful tool and an absolute must when imaging at this scale.
Did you ever try to shoot a target with a Telelens around 200mm and trying to frame the object and holding it still? Well, this telescope has 2000mm focal length and a weight of 15KG, on a mount that is tracking the movement of the night-sky. It’s a crazy ‘zoom’ so as a result the mount has to be crazy accurate and solid.
A few minutes after I finished the last frame of M51 I was imaging the Siamese Twins in all its glory. But, during the second frame I noticed the mount was having some difficulties. An error on the DEC axis every 30 seconds or so, very problematic on 10 minute exposures.
I decided to monitor it and hopefully it would solve itself, it didn’t. I normally setup my equipment out of balance, so the telescope hangs a bit onto the teeth of the gears. I hadn’t done anything else this session and it had been working for the last year just fine. Time to move on to another target which was M64, thankfully the tracking issues were gone.
During my imaging session I occasionally ‘blink’ through the images to monitor the quality. The same I did on the Siamese Twins data. Straight away I noticed that next to NGC 4564, an elliptical Galaxy at a distance of approximate 57 million lightyears, a ‘star’ moving past it. Of course, a star moving rapidly through the field is more likely a satellite or an asteroid in our own solar system. However, the software didn’t show anything on that exact spot, at that exact time. This made me even more curious.
Animation contains 5 frames of 10 minute exposure each.Would I make a new discovery? Probably not... Around the globe there are allot of telescopes monitoring the sky constantly looking for the same kind of objects. Still pretty exciting, right?...
So how do I identify an object that doesn’t show up in any (regular) software?
I’ve never done this before, but I knew all research centers collect and hold their data available to the public. So, I talked to a friend of mine in the UK, Julian Raymond, if he had any experience with it. After chatting with Julian via Google Hangouts he suggested to try the software Aladin, but at that time it was getting late and I had to call it a night. The next day a few of the suggestions Youtube gave were Asteroid-hunting related, thank you Google / Youtube for your suggestion algorithm. So, I ‘stumbled’ upon an Asteroid researcher that used a software called Astrometrica (www.astrometrica.at), which uses an up-to-date scientific external data-source (Minor Planet Center data server).
After trying to Platesolve the image within Astrometrica it couldn’t match the stars in the image with the stars it expected to get, but I did see a pattern in the Platesolve and the pattern of the stars in the image. After some puzzling I realised the image was flipped horizontally. So, after changing the settings and uncheck ‘Flip horizontal’ (makes sense right?) the plate solving worked instantly and it matched with my images.
Using the feature ‘Moving Object Detection’ it would automatically ‘browse’ through the images and find any pattern of objects that moves through the field! Instantly it recognised my captured object and it turned out to be Asteroid 31062 1996 TP10. Officially discovered by Seiji Ueda and Hiroshi Kaneda in 1996! It was first observed in 1954.
Asteroid 31062 1996 TP10 clearly identified by the 'Moving Object Detection' in Astrometrica.And like that wasn't enough, it seemed I also managed to capture Supernova 2020fqv in NGC 4568 (part of the Siamese Twins). Annotated on the image below.
Supernova 2020fqv annotated in NGC 4568.
Cheers and Clear Skies!