Asteroid 2010 LX15

The Astronomy group had an opportunity to contribute towards science today, as they used the Faulkes Telescope (Australia) to obtain images of a possibly newly discovered asteroid. The images they took may appear to be exactly the same, but somewhere within these six images is the tiniest of movements....can anyone spot it?

Students in the class looked up the Right Ascension (RA) and Declination (Dec) - equivalents of latitude and longitude - and found that the area the asteroid was in seemed to be near Scorpios, and possibly in Ophiuchus. Mr Pert guessed that it would be somewhere in the Zodiac zone, since it is probably orbiting the sun in the same plane as the planets.

Tomorrow we are going to take a few more images of the same asteroid, and see if we can find the movement (though I've searched I've had no success so far...) and then we will try a program called 'DS9' to study and compare the images:

Sky Object Name: asteroid
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 15, 2010 15:04:41 UTC
RA: 16h48'41"
DEC: -22°44'36"
Filter: Solar
Exposure time: 120 secs.
Instrument: EM03


Sky Object Name: asteroid
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 15, 2010 15:08:02 UTC
RA: 16h48'41"
DEC: -22°44'36"
Filter: Solar
Exposure time: 120 secs.
Instrument: EM03


Sky Object Name: asteroid
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 15, 2010 15:11:15 UTC
RA: 16h48'41"
DEC: -22°44'36"
Filter: Solar
Exposure time: 120 secs.
Instrument: EM03


Sky Object Name: asteroid
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 15, 2010 15:14:26 UTC
RA: 16h48'41"
DEC: -22°44'36"
Filter: Solar
Exposure time: 120 secs.
Instrument: EM03


Sky Object Name: asteroid
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 15, 2010 15:26:23 UTC
RA: 16h48'41"
DEC: -22°44'36"
Filter: Solar
Exposure time: 120 secs.
Instrument: EM03


This one had a lower exposure time:Sky Object Name: asteroid
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 15, 2010 15:28:27 UTC
RA: 16h48'41"
DEC: -22°44'36"
Filter: Solar
Exposure time: 20 secs.
Instrument: EM03

There was also time in the middle of the session to have a quick look at another deep space object:

NGC 6818Sky Object Name: NGC 6818
Taken By: Uplands Community College
When taken: Jun 15, 2010 15:21:06 UTC
RA: 19h43'58"
DEC: -14°09'07"
Filter: RGB
Exposure time: 20 secs.
Instrument: EM03