Contains:  Solar system body or event
Pluto, four days apart, erdmanpe

Pluto, four days apart

Pluto, four days apart, erdmanpe

Pluto, four days apart

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

Two images, taken four days apart, showing the apparent motion of Pluto through the star-field. I hadn't done this in years, and the first time I tried I felt a little bit like Clyde. The fact that we have now sent a spacecraft past that little dot is even more mind-stretching. Because of the low elevation angle, I had to make several attempts to finally have two nights of decent seeing so that the stars didn't look terrible. Here the stellar FWHM is ~2 arcsec, helped by the relatively short exposure times, as well as selecting the best three images from a number of exposures on each night. Pluto is about 14th mag and appears to approach a ~9th mag star in the 10/30/16 frame. The FOV is ~12.5 arcminutes across, showing Pluto's apparent motion as ~1 arcmin/day. North is up, East to the left, processing in Maxim, slight gamma stretch to bring up the background stars a little.

Comments

Histogram

Pluto, four days apart, erdmanpe