After following asteroid 8 Flora through the stars of Virgo and Leo since the end of February, I was pleased to be able to image its passage part way through galaxy NGC3628 (AKA the Hamburger galaxy) on the night of the 10th April. Unfortunately the waxing gibbous Moon was very close by and skies were partly hazy, which made for very difficult imaging conditions throughout the short April night, but nonetheless I was able to view and image the event from dusk until dawn. During the six hours I was able to observe, the asteroid travelled around three quarters of the length of the galaxy, looking unmistakably bright against the dust lanes of NGC3628. Through gaps in the clouds I shot batches of 6 x LRGB images ranging from 30 seconds to two minutes exposures each and then stacked all 147 images in order to star align them to be able to make a mono animations to show the asteroid's movement. I then stacked the six RGB batches separately to make a colour animation in a similar way. Due to the time delay in acquiring the RGB batches, the asteroid appears as a tri-coloured ball as each of the primary colours were captured at slightly different time intervals as shown in the cropped colour animation. The wider field mono animation that uses all 147 LRGB images, shows all three of the Leo triplet galaxy. Due to extreme differences in exposures, moonlight and clouds/haze it was not possible to normalise the brightness of the frames and I chose the best of the worst of the colour images to show the asteroid at roughly the centre point of the Hamburger galaxy. All images were shot with an ASI533MM Pro camera attached to a Sky-Watcher Esprit 80ED fitted with a field flattener. Data were stacked and processed in Pixinsight, with the animations made using Pixinsight's Blink utility.
Click on an image to get a closer view
Asteroid 8 flora transiting the Hamburger galaxy
Movement through the Hamburger galaxy
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