Asteroid 28-Bellona and Asteroid 8-Flora

 Asteroid 28-Bellona:

In response to a challenge by a fellow SAS member to see if it would be possible to image a magnitude 10 asteroid 28-Bellona, which is currently meandering through the stars of Cancer on its way towards transiting the Beehive cluster in just under a month's time, I took the opportunity to take the first of what I hope might be many more such exposures today. With poor weather conditions of late, the first opportunity for getting any data arose this morning with the target low in the SW sky just before dawn as the sky cleared. Taking two minute mono exposures with an ASI 533MM Pro camera attached to a Sky-Watcher 80 Esprit triplet refractor, I was able to capture the dim asteroid in the frame. The six luminance subs were stacked together in DSS and processed in Pixinsight and Adobe Photoshop 2025 to identify the asteroid by cross referencing publicised positional data for this asteroid. I hope that subsequent captures in the days and weeks ahead should be able to show the asteroids passage through space, culminating in its travel through M44 the Beehive Cluster around March 23rd.

Asteroid 8-Flora:

In searching for the asteroid 28-Bellona's position online, I came across an article in the BBC Sky at Night online magazine written by astronomer Pete Lawrence outlining another opportunity for capturing the passage of a magnitude 10 asteroid that was headed towards another famous deep sky object. This was asteroid 8-Flora currently passing between Virgo and Leo, which will pass through the Leo triplet of galaxies in April, actually transiting the Hamburger galaxy over the period 9-12 April. As this was higher in the sky, I set about taking a similar amount of mono data with the same equipment and then decided to take the same amount of red, green and blue data to hopefully show the passage of the asteroid through the separate colour trails. As before I stacked the mono data in DSS and processed the result in Pixinsight and Adobe Photoshop 2025 to annotate the asteroids position. I stacked the colour data in Pixinsight and processed in a similar way to reveal the colour merge path as intended. I also used Pixinsight's plate solve and annotation features to confirm the object as being asteroid 8-Flora. I then cropped the wide field image to show a closeup view of the target.

Chris Bowden