Asteroid (234) Barbara 07-23-23

I’ve only had one opportunity for asteroid imaging in the past six months, the most recent being on July 23^rd. I’m finally getting around to posting the results of that session. Being somewhat rusty, I went for a relatively easy target, asteroid (234) Barbara.

(234) Barbara is a main-belt asteroid, and on the morning of July 23rd was at V magnitude 10.7. She was also moving along at a good clip for a main-belt asteroid at nearly 47 arcseconds per hour (0.78 arcseconds per minute).

Full image details follow below.

This is a slightly cropped full-frame image of (234) Barbara, with a field of view of approximately 30×18 arcminutes. The time-lapse animation covers approximately 1.5 hours.

This is a cropped and enlarged image with the finder chart from the Lowell Observatory’s online Asteroid Finder tool for comparison. The green circles on the finder chart show the asteroid’s projected movement at 30-minute intervals. The animation shows that (234) Barbara was right on course. The field of view is approximately 10×10 arcminutes.

Image Details
Date/Time: July 23, 2023 05:08:42-06:41:17 UT
Location: Edmond, Oklahoma USA
Seeing: Fair; Transparency: Fair; Sky Brightness: Bortle 7
Length: 1.5 hour (98 minutes) time-lapse animation.
Image Capture: 19 images, each a stack of 10 @ 30 seconds (total 300 sec per image). Gain 250.
Orientation: North up. East left. Up is 1.3 degrees E of N
Telescope: Celestron C8 (203mm SCT f/10) operating at f/5.8 (Celestron f/6.3 Focal Reducer/Flattener + 128.5 mm spacers)
Camera: ZWO ASI482MC
Capture: SharpCap Pro
Guiding: PhD2
Processing: Deep Sky Stacker, GIMP
Plate Solve: Astrometry.net

Asteroid (234) Barbara 07-23-23

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