March 19, 2010

Asteroid 53468 Varros imaged with Celestron CGEM 9.25" SCT, StellaCam II and .5X reducer. Mar 19, 2010 ~01:00UT. Image comprised of 102 exposures @ 8.55 seconds each for a total exposure time of 14.5 minutes. Varros is currently around magnitude 19 or 20. Full image with label    Full image

March 18, 2010

Image of asteroid 53468 Varros imaged with Celestron CGEM 9.25" SCT, StellaCam II and .5X reducer. Mar 18, 2010 01:00UT
Full image with label    Full image

March 7, 2010

Image of asteroid 53468 Varros imaged with Celestron CGEM 9.25" SCT, StellaCam II and .5X reducer. Mar 7, 2010 02:00UT
Image without label

Stefano Sposetti of Gnosca Observatory in Switzerland, with some 120 asteroid discoveries to his credit, recently requested that the main belt asteroid, 2000 AC2 (53468), be named "Varros", in recognition of my contribution to lunar meteoroid impact detection work. The IAU approved of the request so the asteroid is now (53468) Varros! This is an utter thrill and I am not sure how to even thank Mr. Sposetti for this honor but I will start here by at least saying Thank You Sir! Along with his numerous asteroid discoveries, Mr. Sposetti also images lunar impacts, gamma-ray bursters (GRB), exo-planets and other fleeting transient objects, pushing the upper limits of the technologies used in amateur astronomy. Mr. Sposetti is a physics teacher and maintains a web-site with some of these very unique and inspiring images. Again, Thank You Mr. Sposetti for this honor!

Stefano Sposetti 143-Gnosca          53468 Varros (2000 AC2) JPL Small-Body Database Browser

The animation below is from NEAT DSS images from 2002 that were taken 1 hour apart. (200212270503)