Hey All,
I was imaging LDN 1584 last month when I noticed some aberrant small streaks in the stacked results over 2 nights. The position of the streak had changed from one night to the next so I blinked through the individual subs and saw what looked like a moving ‘star’ in the location of said streak.
I made a video of it's movement, plate-solved the coordinates, and cross-checked it against the MPC database of near-earth objects. This is an extreme close-up of around 60 2min subs, blinked in Pixinsight after registration.
Turns out to be an Asteroid named "44318 1998 RK24 ". At least it precisely follows the trajectory and location of this object on the date in question.
The only thing that bothers me is how bright it is. It apparently has a magnitude of 19.28 but I checked the stars around this area in Stellarium and they should be much brighter than 19.28, but the moving object is just as bright as them in my capture.
Is this just a product of pixels being saturated and therefore I can’t trust the brightness of the stars around it? I hope I’m making sense.
Anyway it is fairly cool for me if it is indeed the named asteroid. First time I’ve come across one.
asteroid.mov📷 asteroid-ezgif.com-video-to-gif-converter (1).gif
