10th January

C/2014 Q2 Comet Lovejoy
This is now well placed in the northern hemisphere.

10 x100 minutes in luminance, kappa sigma clipining to remove stars



LRGB version



Stacked to show stars. A satellite messed up the 7th frame



Stacked using "average". More detail in tail showing.



I wondered how rapidly the tail of the comet would change over time.
This is two images separated by 73 minutes:




As can be seen, the tail is very different.
This means that an image that hopes to show the tail well should be completed in quite a short time.
Perhaps 15 minutes is a target to aim for.
This would be 5 minutes each for RGB, so 5x60 seconds for each filter?

28th January

Moon. 10x0,2 seconds, OIII filter



A large asteroid (357439) 2004 BL86 travelled close to the Earth on 26th January at a safe distance of 1.2 million kilometres.
Weather conditions prevented any images on the 26th, but a spell of clear sky on the 28th allowed some images to be captured.

This animation shows the progress of the asteroid over a period of 17.5 minutes.


Astrometry

The predicted position for the asteroid at 7:00:00pm was

RA 09 48 04.7 DEC +53 07 08
An image started at 7:00:05 gave good agreement with
RA 09 48 04.36 DEC +53 07 12.2





31st January

Asteroid 2004 BL86 is now 7,048,827 km away from the Earth. It is 325 metres in diameter, so this is
equivalent to looking at a £1 coin at a distance of 477km.

Consequently it is getting rather faint.
This animation shows two 300 second exposures.



The ASA DDM60 mount was instructed to track at the asteroid's speed.
This shows the asteroid as a small dot amongst the trailed stars: