Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Virgo (Vir)  ·  Contains:  1 Ceres  ·  7.49  ·  IC 3731  ·  PGC 1408622  ·  PGC 1408823  ·  PGC 1409720  ·  PGC 1410334  ·  PGC 1412474
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Ceres (Animation), Mau_Bard
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Ceres (Animation)

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Description

I was about asking the help of the friends here to identify the moving object in the animation, when the Astrobin advanced Platesolving gave the answer: it is the dwarf planet Ceres.
I inadvertently photographed it the night of 21 February 2023 from 1:29 to 4:33 UT, in Virgo at coordinates RA = 12 46 11 Dec = +12 31 50, in the proximity of galaxy PGC1412474, while taking this image.
Update 14 March 2023: I realized that in a slightly larger field than the one of the animation, it is included the second asteroid Chloris as shown in the picture.

Below the picture, are available a few comments about Ceres and the Dawn exploration mission, mostly excerpted from Wikipedia.

Warm thanks to the friends that answered in the comments below to my original request of help regarding tools to identify asteroids in the pictures!

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Picture 1: Asteroids Ceres and Chloris. My annotated sub-exposure at 1:39:07 UT, 21.2.2023

Ceres and Dawn Mission

Ceres (minor-planet designation: 1 Ceres) is a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It was the first asteroid discovered, on 1 January 1801, by Giuseppe Piazzi at Palermo Astronomical Observatory in Sicily and announced as a new planet. Ceres was later classified as an asteroid and then a dwarf planet. Piazzi's proposed name for his discovery was Ceres after the Roman goddess of agriculture, whose earthly home, and oldest temple, lay in Sicily.

Little detail was known about it until the robotic NASA spacecraft Dawn approached Ceres for its orbital mission in 2015.
By the way: Dawn was an innovative mission as it was the first space exploratory mission to use a ion propulsion engine (test missions were run already back in the sixties), that allowed it to reach and orbit the two celestial bodies Vesta and Ceres. Currently the Down spacecraft is dead in stable orbit around Ceres.

Ceres has a diameter of 940 Km, and orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.77 AU, on a plane inclined 10 degrees to ecliptic. It sidereal orbital period is 4.6 years while the synodic orbital period (explained here) is 1.28 years

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Picture 2: inclined orbit of Ceres, from Wikipedia, by Orionist and Amichell

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Picture 3: Ceres (below left) compared to Moon and Earth. From Wikipedia, by PlanetUser Gregory H. Revera, NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

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