Obs-Session 190322

Had a pretty nice obs-session last night.  I collected data on R Leo, and the asteroids (2) Pallas and (433) Eros.  My only complaint is that I had trouble finding the targets and that task took too long for every target.  With my first target - R Leo - I even came back into my office and checked the coordinates because I couldn't seem to find the star patterns on the chart.  But I'm very stubborn so I finally found it.  Collected 100, 2 second, 2x2 binned images and 40 darks of R Leo itself, and then another 100, 2 second, 2x2 binned images of a nearby comparison (or reference) star.

I then proceeded to the asteroid Eros, which was still high in the sky but getting lower by the minute.  Had trouble finding the target, but again prevailed and finally figured it out.  The main trouble was that there are sooooooo many stars!

And here's Eros moving by showing you the first image followed by the last image in a loop:

I've also made a movie of the entire session with Eros:

https://youtu.be/31JWsSTi4Jk

I then moved on to (2) Pallas.  Same trouble finding the the target, but for the opposite reason.  In this part of the sky, the stars are SPARCE!  So simply finding a pattern of stars that fit into my small field of view (12 arcmin by 9 arcmin) was a challenge.  I was about to give up for the night when I finally saw a recognizable pattern which was surprisingly close to the target!

Here's an image of (2) Pallas:

... and here's the same kind of movie as above.  Notice how much less Pallas moves versus Eros.

my manual stacking here isn't perfect, so you'll notice that the star at the lower right appears to be moving.  It's not.  (2) Pallas is that bright one at upper left.

I collected 200, 2 second, 2x2 binned images of (2) Pallas.  Wow that's a lot of two's.

So now I need to reduce the data and then make the photometric and astrometric measurements.  That's all just tedious work which I'll get done in a blast of time in the next couple of days.