Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Virgo (Vir)
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Trojan asteroid 617 Patroclus, ~2hr of motion, erdmanpe
Trojan asteroid 617 Patroclus, ~2hr of motion
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Trojan asteroid 617 Patroclus, ~2hr of motion

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Trojan asteroid 617 Patroclus, ~2hr of motion, erdmanpe
Trojan asteroid 617 Patroclus, ~2hr of motion
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Trojan asteroid 617 Patroclus, ~2hr of motion

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Description

Inspired by the coming launch of NASA's Lucy mission to the Trojan asteroids (Oct. 2021), I realized that the L5 Trojans should be visible to me now, so I gave the most favorable one, Patroclus, a try. It took a couple of nights to figure out how to image it, but here is a sum of 3 minute exposures, each separated by one minute, to get the asteroid's motion. It was about 16th mag at the time. Data acquired and processed in Maxim, only dark subtraction, no non-linear stretch.

For the revision I went back to the original image to see if I could possibly identify any more asteroids and found a few more using the MPCORB database.  The position, relative length and orientation of proper motion, and brightness seemed consistent with the database for identification.

A (617) Patroclus mag 16.1
B (13293) Mechelen mag 18.7
C (11845) 1987RZ mag 19.1
D (91358) 1999 JL65 mag 18.9

Probably have to go to one of the higher resolution views to see the little streaks, especially the barely visible ones.

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  • Trojan asteroid 617 Patroclus, ~2hr of motion, erdmanpe
    Original
  • Final
    Trojan asteroid 617 Patroclus, ~2hr of motion, erdmanpe
    B

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Trojan asteroid 617 Patroclus, ~2hr of motion, erdmanpe