About fifty years ago, as a small boy, I wrote to the British Astronomer Royal, who was then I think Sir Richard Woolley, excitedly suggesting that I had discovered another new planet in the same Lowell images that Tombaugh had used to discover Pluto.  I received a very kind reply from him, thanking me, and noting that my tracings of the plates matched up nicely with the originals, but arguing that it was very unlikely that there would be two previously undiscovered planets in the same star field.  I immediately saw the logic of this, and it was perhaps my first lesson in scientific reasoning!

Fast forward fifty years and I got the urge to try and image Pluto with my own equipment.  I have however repeatedly tried and failed to identify the small grey dot on some very dense star fields. but recently saw a contributor on Cloudy Nights had identified Pluto using the plate solving facility on Astrometry.net

I therefore uploaded three images captured in July and September 2023.  After a number of failures I managed to get the images properly solved and was able to home in on Pluto  for all three images. The single image presented here is a composite of the three, showing the movement of Pluto between 12 July and 17 Sept 2023 (pluto was in Aquarius at the time).  I used an image from 22 July as the canvas and cropped and overlaid the other two images onto it.  I took care to rotate and align the overlying images so that the star patterns matched as closely as possible.  Here are a few learnings for others who may wish to try.

1.  I used a RASA8 to image the star fields.  I took 10  x 30 sec captures which I integrated etc using Astropixel Processor.  
2. The star fields that resulted were very dense (noting that the RASA operates at f2), and, for this reason - I think -  Astrometry repeatedly failed to solve the patterns.
3. I had to return to the original images and adjust levels to exclude all but the brighter stars, which meant that Astrometry was now quickly able to solve the patterns and place my image on the star-map.  
4. More by luck than judgement, I had not excluded Pluto in removing the faint stars, and was still able to see a grey dot at the identified location for each of the three images.
5.  Matching up the three star fields was harder than I anticipated as there seemed to be slight distortions to their relative geometries, perhaps as a consequence of the stacking process, camera tilt variation, or my old standby excuse, demonic intrusion.
6. I had originally thought that having a month or two between images would make it easier to see the planet but the reality is that it is probably better to have only a few days between images - Pluto will move suprisingly far - and leave the camera in place for the two images so that they are very easily comparable.