I have been hunting Kuiper belt objects recently and the first good image set I bagged was of a dwarf planet beyond Pluto's orbit, (136472) Makemake. On April 4, 2021 when I captured this image sequence, Makemake was 51.735 AU from us and was approximately 17.1 magnitude, passing near star SAO 82690 in Coma Berenices. For comparison on that same night, Pluto was 34.135 AU away from us and was about 14.4 magnitude. Makemake is about 1400km in diameter, making it roughly half the diameter of Pluto. Makemake has a distinctly reddish hue, which showed up numerically in the image data I collected, but not with enough saturation to really show visually in this image, so here it appears nearly white.

Vital statistics comparing Makemake to Pluto:

Makemake: Appehelion: 52.756 AU, perehelion: 38.104 AU, orbital period: 306.21 years, diameter: about 1400 to 1500km, as it is not very round.

Pluto: Appehelion: 49.305 AU, perehelion: 29.658AU, orbital period: 247.94 years, diameter: 2,376km (definitely round!)

I took fourteen 4 minute images at roughly regular intervals over a period of 1 hour and 37 minutes in an attempt to detect its motion. Over this period of time it i measured it moving about 4 arc seconds, which works out to about 8 pixels in this image. This translates to crawling only about 60 arc seconds of across the sky per day owing to its great distance and long orbital period of 306 years. For comparison on the same evening, a main belt asteroid like (1) Ceres only 2.7 AU from us moved about 1420 arc seconds per day, taking only 4.6 years to go around the Sun.

A stack of the 14 four minute images an be seen in image revision A showing a small Makemake as a small streak at the center of the image. I also took the same 14 images and produced an animation of Makemake's motion, image revision B. The are that is animated from image revision A is marked with a dashed box. Each 4 minute images were live stacks of 240 x one second exposures.

The first image was taken at 2021-04-05 04:47:17Z GMT

The last image was taken at 2021-04-05 06:24:15Z GMT