Asteroid 940 Kordulla and a pair of faint spiral arms in M66

by Richard Crisp

this morning I saw a posting by Roy Cummings stating that there was an asteroid in the area of M65/M66 last night, 940 Kordula. I took another look at my data and discovered that I had captured it in my image sequence.

I reprocessed and assembled all the luminance and color data into one monochrome image to show the path of the asteroid over the course of the evening. During the nearly five hours I was taking data, I got a reasonable track of the asteroid.

http://www.rdcrisp.darkhorizons.org/940_kordula_page.htm

Another thing worth noting in the shot with the Asteroid, are the spiral arms of M66. I see a very faint pair of spiral arms at the 2 oclock position of M66. One is close in and has a bright star toward the end. Slightly higher and further out is another faint spiral arm, fainter than the first, at a slightly larger radius and also ending with a bright star at the end.

I'm not sure how often that second spiral arm shows up, I had not noticed it before.

Posted on sf-bay-tac Sat Feb 28 22:13:32 2004 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.0 Fri Mar 12 21:39:15 2004 PT