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Old February 29th 04, 06:07 AM
Richard Crisp
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Default ASTRO: Asteroid 940 Kordula in the M65/M66/NGC3628 area

I imaged the Leo Trio last night. This morning I saw a posting by Roy
Cummings stating that there was an asteroid in the area of M65/M66 last
night, 940 Kordula. I took another look at my data and discovered that I had
captured it in my image sequence.

I reprocessed and assembled all the luminance and color data into one
monochrome image to show the path of the asteroid over the course of the
evening. During the nearly five hours I was taking data, I got a reasonable
track of the asteroid.

http://www.rdcrisp.darkhorizons.org/...rdula_page.htm

Another thing worth noting in the shot with the Asteroid, are the spiral
arms of M66. I see a very faint pair of spiral arms at the 2 oclock position
of M66. One is close in and has a bright star toward the end. Slightly
higher and further out is another faint spiral arm, fainter than the first,
at a slightly larger radius and also ending with a bright star at the end.

I'm not sure how often that second spiral arm shows up, I had not noticed it
before.