by Jason Hatton
Just a reminder about asteroid Hermes (1937 UB), which may only be trackable by us (non-imaging) amateurs for a few more days. The sky conditions may not cooperate tonight, but you never know. Anybody else keeping an eye on Hermes, which now appears to be a double asteroid? Have any of you imagers tried recording its track?
I succeeded in imaging it over a week ago, when it was moving about 4 arc minutes an hour. Here is the image, taken with my C9.25 & SAC-8 camera;
http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/hattonjasonp/planets/Hermes-22Oct03-0601-0615UT.jpg
The asteroid is the small trail on the right side of the image, as a result of its motion during the 14 minutes of total exposure time. This was my first attempt at imaging an asteroid - I was very pleased to see the trail on the first set of images, especially after a long star hop through a rather barren and obscure part of the sky!
Visually the asteroid was still only mag+14.1 at the time of this observation & was very difficult to see with certainty through the eyepiece.
