I Found My Asteroid !

I actually do have an asteroid named after me, here is the official document.

But where is it? Space is pretty big, after all…

Luckily, as an officially named asteroid, its location is precisely known. Using “TheSkyX”, my telescope’s control software, I can search for my asteroid, and it in turn instructs my telescope exactly where to look.

Asteroids will move relative to the stars, so my hope is that if I take back to back images, something in the center of my image will move a little bit.

A magnitude of 18.37 is not very bright, fainter than Pluto, so I decided to take long 10 minute exposures.

I have been waiting a long time for my asteroid to be in my field of view at night. It finally is, but is very low in the sky, which will make it even harder to spot.

On June 19, at around 11:00pm at my location, TheSkyX computed and displayed the asteroid’s location relative to its stored “star map.” For confirmation purposes, note the two stars left/below the predicted location, and the two brighter stars above and to the right.

Here is a short movie I made of the two images I took, blinking back and force.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/bb16e5_d8145213f3cf428e835de499726b7d38/720p/mp4/file.mp4

Seems to my that I found my asteroid, and it appears, some other, smaller asteroids.