Asteroids and what this section is all about ...........
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You can see how I plan my asteroid imaging and also how I create the time lapse of the complete capture.

How do you know it's not a plane or satellite .... some clues


During May and June 2016 I was imaging NGC4565 (The Needle galaxy) - One morning I stacked my 24x10 minute exposures and found a line on my image. 
What's so interesting about this? Well it means that while the stars are remaining static in the field with the guiding working, something was moving across the frame at a fairly slow pace as that was the entire movement in 4 hours.

As a reference a plane or satellite would go through the entire image, you can see the difference below.
I knew from the first picture that this was not a plane or satellite trail and so I wondered if it was a asteroid.

So what is this dot and how do you know?

Most astronomers will have some form of planetarium software on their PC showing what is about and when. For this purpose I use Cartes Du Ciel. While not a particularly pretty piece of software it is quick, not resource intensive and shows me all that I want.

I used this software to look at the date and time I was imaging and selected the 'show asteroid' menu. I did have to load in some database information so that the most recent orbits were showing accurately.

As you can see below, I had quickly found my Asteroid. I was able to match my image to the Planetarium image fairly accurately. Looking at both images, there is no doubt about the 'dot'
I may well have imaged many asteroids before, but I've never noticed them. There's over 700,000 asteroids now in my planetarium software and so when there's nothing else to do, I'm going to do some more of these! 

Sure there's only a white dot to watch, but in the case of (582) Olympia this is a mere 43km in diameter and travelling at 18km/s and I managed to capture it from my garden.

Asteroid captures so far and their information

Name
Discovery date
Discovered by 
Size (km diameter)
Speed (km/s)
Date of observation
Magnitude
(582) Olympia
23 Jan 1906
August Kopff
43
18
05 June 2016
13.96
(276) Adelheid
17 April 1888
​Johann Palisa
122
16.88
15 June 2016
14.3
(467336) 2002 LT38
12 June 2002
LINEAR @ Socorro
0.27-0.59
not known
15 June 2016
15.9
(16528) Terakado
2 April 1991
Kazuro Watanabe
8.2
not known
31 May 2019
​12.8
(1528) Conrada
​10 Feb 1940
​Karl Wilhelm Reinmuth
11
19.07
31 May 2019
11.7
(25982) 2001 FQ57
19 March 2001
​LINEAR @ Socorro
15.6
17.2
06 June 2019
​12.9
(234) Barbara
12 Aug 1883
​CHF Peters
45.6
20.3
​06 June 2019
9.02
(1679) Nevanlinna
​18 March 1941
L Oterna
52.6
19.7
06 June 2019
14.6
(104599) 2000 GA54
05 April 2000
​LINEAR @ Socorro
4
22.6
06 June 2019
18.2
(1558) Jarnefelt
20 Jan 1942
L Oterna @ Turku
45
16.2
10 June 2019
10.3
(76882) 2000 YA54
30 Dec 2000
​​LINEAR @ Socorro
Not known
20.9
10 June 2019
15.4
(22679) AmyDavid
17 Aug 1998
Lincoln @ Socorro
Not known
23.5 
10 June 2019
15.1
(225) Henrietta
19 Apr 1882
J Palisa
95.8
20.1
19 June 2019
13.8
(6) Hebe
01 July 1847
K L Hencke @ Dreisen
185
15.6
05 May 2020
10.3​
(780) Armenia
25 Jan 1914
G Neujim @ Simeis
63.13
15.8
08 May 2020
14
(950) Ahrensa
01 Apr 1921
K Reinmuth @ Heidelberg
13
20.2
20 May 2020
14.9

Video captures of my observations