Not everyone wants to spend the time to work through the A-Team tutorials. Not everyone wants to be an Astronomer member of The Online Telescope or buy a license for Astrometrica. So here we have a simple approach to imaging a Main Belt Asteroid (MBA).
MBAs live in the region between Mars and Jupiter. They move quite slowly so they are not too difficult to capture. There are some already set up in the Slooh 1000 so anyone can have a go.
Go to the Slooh 1000 (click on the magnifying glass upper left), scroll down to Small Solar System Bodies and select the + on the left.
Scroll down and select the + next to Main Belt Asteroids. You will see a list of possible targets. Select one of them and then its Mission tab.
From the missions tab you can see information about the visibility of your target. You are looking for two missions, as close as possible in time (up to a couple of hours will be OK) and on the same telescope. You may have to try various different targets or observation dates to find what you are looking for.
When you have two suitable missions, book them.
Now you just have to sit back and wait for the missions to run and hope for good weather!
On your Slooh Desktop select Photos then Missions. You should see your missions listed.
Mouseover a mission and select View Detail. You will see one or more images.
Select the image with the best detail and contrast and use the Download button.
Download the images from your missions and load them into your favourite GIF Maker. Set the blink speed to about 1 second and have a look.
Its obvious which one is Vesta, but the image is a bit shaky with the stars moving about. That’s because the telescope was not pointing in exactly the same direction for each image.
Those of you that already have Astro-image processing software will be able to align the images for a better result. There may be an on-line GIF makers that can do that, but I have not found one.
You can align the images fairly well using any photo editing app that has a “crop” feature. Load the images into the app, select a couple of stars, upper left and lower right of the target, and use them as a guide to crop each image to the same field of view. Then save the cropped images and recreate the GIF. You can also add some text to complete the observation.
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