Asteroids 28- Bellona and 8-Flora

Asteroids 28- Bellona and 8-Flora motion path mosaics:

Image trials of asteroids 28-Bellona and 8-Flora using an ASI 533MM Pro mono camera and a SW Esprit 8ED with FF driven with an iOptron CEM26 drive guided by an ASI462MC camera. All data was acquired using NINA. 

Following a run of imaging regions of sky where these asteroids are currently travelling, I tried both luminance and RGB data to see how I could effectively monitor their movements among the stars.

During each imaging run I shot half a dozen 2 min subs on each channel for the nights I was able to take data and used Pixinsight to align and annotate them using merge mosaic by coordinates and the draw script to add circles and dates of each capture point contained in the mosaic which I then cropped into rectangles. The coloured asteroid points positions against the background stars are quite interesting, as rather than just a grey elongated egg with luminance data, they show- the difference between 12 min integrations of each channel plus the auto focus time so ~ 15 mins elapses between each colour integration to show distinct red green and blue dots. 

The times shown in the RGB data set are the mid times for the subs taken.

Click on an image to get a closer view

Chris Bowden