Astroblog: Where's Vesta?

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Where's Vesta?

Where's Vesta? Well, roughly where those yellow lines are just below Scorpius (click to enlarge). I took this image with my Olympus digital camera just before Moonlight overwhelmed Vesta, and you can *just* see Vesta on the 1 Mb original (not on this web version though). If you want to see Vesta with the unaided eye, you have to wait until 5 June, when the Moon rises sunstantially after Vesta.

Of course you can see Vesta in binoculars and small telescopes even in the Moonlight, so don't let the Moonlight stop you from looking.

As part of testing the capabilities of "Don", the 8" scope, I took this image of Vesta. It's not very exciting, the magnitude limit of the webcam means that there is nothing else but the bright blob that is Vesta in the field (the streaky bits are hot pixels in the camera). Unfortunately, its not until arround June 17 that Vesta goes near any star that will show up in the webcam.

Labels: asteroids, astrophotography, Observational Astronomy, Vesta