2019 BF5 Success!

Wow! That took a lot of processing, but there it is, a 210m diameter rock 13.6 million kilometers away, dazzling us with it magnitude 17.5 brilliance.

Image is roughly South up, 15 arc minutes across, centered around 8h 8m 38s, +10 52′ 54″ at 0951 UTC Monday night.

This is a stack of 200 x 15 second images, aligned on the stars, then each image shifted 6.1 arc seconds so the asteroid is in the same place.

I used Deep Sky Stacker comet stacking, with a few fudges to get it to behave! Since the asteroid is not visible in a single frame I had to create a fake asteroid off the side of the first and last image, offset from the true asteroid position by a fixed amount. I used Astrometrica to determine the exact position for the fake asteroid in the images, based on predictions from the minor planet centre. Then I had to fudge the times of the images since the processed images lost their time info, and DSS uses the time stamp to interpolate position.

Astrometrica is meant to be able to stack these images straight off, but I have trouble getting it to detect stars properly, and it only accepts FITs format, which I forgot when I recorded the images in the wrong format!

Anyway, I’ll call this a success 🙂