Saturday, November 1, 2008

Verifying Vesta

I caught a glimpse of asteroid Vesta a couple of nights ago and decided to verify the sighting by seeing how far it moved. This time I simply told Autostar to find Vesta and it went right to it. It had moved to the west of SAO110592 by about 28'. The seeing wasn't quite as good and I had a bit more trouble making out the arc formed by SAO110592 and three other 8th magnitude stars. Wednesday night Vesta looked like a slightly brighter 5th star in the arc. Tonight it was right in line with the former and SAO110555. Vesta was brighter and about the same brightness as HR719 to its lower left. While I was at it, I tried to see M77 (Seyfert galaxy) near Del Cet but it was just too dim.

No comments: