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Atalante was one of November 2001's fastest moving asteroids. I have always wanted to catch some pictures of the relative motion of an asteroid against the background stars. On November 7th 2001, I started a sequence of images. The asteroid was at magnitude 10.6 in the constellation Andromeda. I grabbed a 10 second integration every 30 seconds. After one hour, I had a stack of new images to play with. The next day, I did some post processing and co-registered the images and made a little movie of the motion of the asteroid. The individual frames were manually aligned and combined to create this GIF animation. The asteroid moved westward (to the right) 50 arc seconds. The images are 6 arc minutes tall by 4 arc minutes wide. North is up and East is to the left. The separation of the pair in the lower right corner is also 50 arc seconds. The images were captured with the 10" LX200, f/6.3, ST-7, 1x1 binning, no filter. The scope was mounted in the alta-azmuth configuration and tracked the asteroid nearly through the zenith. This was my first image stacking exercise, and there was a significant amount of field rotation during the hour, almost 90 degrees worth. Heavy dewing on the corrector plate was present during this sequence that affected the image quality near the end of the run. Click here for the write-up in The Observer.
