Didymos with tail after DART impact (Bruce Van Deventer)

Contains: Solar system body or event

Didymos with tail after DART impact

The asteroid Dimorphos, which orbits Didymos, was imacted by the DART space probe on Sept. 26. At the time, the asteroid pair was too low in the southern sky for Northern obserers. Now it is well positioned in the morning sky. The debris "tail" looks very much like a typical comet dust tail. This is a stack of 20 x 60 second exposures, binned 3x. The asteroid sky motion was about 5.2 arc seconds per minute so there is a little elongation but the tail is very visible. The overall brightness is mag 15.2 which is quite bright.

The images are acquired, calibrated, plate solved, and aligned in ASTAP. Then they are imported into TYCHO. In TYCHO, the synthetic tracking feature is used to perform a constrained search on moving objects in the position angle and speed (arc seconds per minute) expected. TYCHO finds the best stacking fit for all objects within the constrained search. It then displays a median stack for each object. The median stack tends to suppress the bright background stars into faint streaks. I exported the median stack as a FITS file and imported it into SAOimage DS9 for range adjustment and a slight stretch, and then exported the image above.

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Didymos with tail after DART impact

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