Contains:  Solar system body or event
(65803) Didymos after its moon was struck by the Dart spacecraft, lowenthalm

(65803) Didymos after its moon was struck by the Dart spacecraft

Revision title: Composite with nice stars

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging
(65803) Didymos after its moon was struck by the Dart spacecraft, lowenthalm

(65803) Didymos after its moon was struck by the Dart spacecraft

Revision title: Composite with nice stars

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

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Description

I captured this one month after its moon was struck by the planetary defense experiment spacecraft DART. I wanted to image it earlier, but did not have access to a dark sky site and it was much too low on the southern horizon until only the last few days. To my surprise, the object still had an active tail. The binary asteroid was about 0.86 AU from Earth when I imaged this starting at 2022-10-19 10:31:48 UTC. It was about 6.5 degrees east of Beta Monoceros. Due to its proximity to us, it was moving very rapidly. In these images, it was about 2.5 arc seconds every minute, causing the shape of the asteroid to smear in the direction of motion.

Rev A:
This is a stack of all 31 one minute subs I took (each was 12 x 5 seconds) during the 45 minute observing period. Stars were mostly removed by sigma clipping during stacking. The "speed" streaks are whats left of the stars that weren't fully rejected during stacking. This best shows the tail. Image dimensions are 13.8 x 9.2 arc minutes. The bright blurry star its streaking by at the upper center is double star HR 2570 with magnitudes 6.5 and 7.2 (not split here as they are only separated by 1.3 arc seconds). 

Rev B:
This is a color animation showing the motion of the asteroid and its tail against the stars for the entire 45 minute long observation. The field of view here is 10 x 6 arc minutes. There is a slight darkened streak just below the tail which I am pretty sure is just a processing artifact. There are some variations in tail brightness, especially noticeable close to the asteroid. The tail seemed to be at its longest during the first image, and seemed to shorten some for most of the rest of the observing run.

Rev C:
I stacked the and color corrected star field and composited in Rev A data as if the asteroid magically stood still at about 2022-10-19 10:41:09 UTC so that I could take a proper picture of it for 30 minutes.

Image scale in both images was 0.68 arc seconds per pixel.

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Revisions

  • (65803) Didymos after its moon was struck by the Dart spacecraft, lowenthalm
    Original
  • (65803) Didymos after its moon was struck by the Dart spacecraft, lowenthalm
    B
  • Final
    (65803) Didymos after its moon was struck by the Dart spacecraft, lowenthalm
    C

B

Title: Animated version

Description: Motion over 45 minutes as it moved 111 arc seconds across the sky

Uploaded: ...

C

Title: Composite with nice stars

Description: Lets imagine the silly thing stood still so I could properly take its picture...

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Histogram

(65803) Didymos after its moon was struck by the Dart spacecraft, lowenthalm

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