How to identify mystery moving objects?

I took several LRGB frames of Andromeda last night.

Before going to bed, I stacked the luminance frames to get a quick
peek at what I'd captured and noticed a short trail near M32.
Inspecting individual frames showed a faint object of about mag 18
moving at ~2 arcsec/minute.

I know the times and my own location and using PinPoint I can get the
objects RA and DEC to within 0.2 arcsec in each frame. So with this
information, how do I determine what object this is? I'm not asking
anyone to identify it for me, but to point me at resources that will
help me find out for myself.

So far, I've found and played with "small body search" on the jpl/nasa
site. Software like that for PC would be brilliant (anything out
there?), but I'd also like pointers to recommended articles, books or
sites that explain the math and techniques relevant to this whole
area. Where to start?

Cheers
Beats

Beats,
Try this site:
http://scully.harvard.edu/~cgi/CheckMP
Minor Planet Checker
Clear skies,
Matt Mills
Minor Planet Project


"justbeats" wrote in message
m...
I took several LRGB frames of Andromeda last night.

Before going to bed, I stacked the luminance frames to get a quick
peek at what I'd captured and noticed a short trail near M32.
Inspecting individual frames showed a faint object of about mag 18
moving at ~2 arcsec/minute.

I know the times and my own location and using PinPoint I can get the
objects RA and DEC to within 0.2 arcsec in each frame. So with this
information, how do I determine what object this is? I'm not asking
anyone to identify it for me, but to point me at resources that will
help me find out for myself.

So far, I've found and played with "small body search" on the jpl/nasa
site. Software like that for PC would be brilliant (anything out
there?), but I'd also like pointers to recommended articles, books or
sites that explain the math and techniques relevant to this whole
area. Where to start?

Cheers
Beats

On Tue, 19 Oct 2004, justbeats wrote:

I know the times and my own location and using PinPoint I can get the
objects RA and DEC to within 0.2 arcsec in each frame. So with this
information, how do I determine what object this is? I'm not asking
anyone to identify it for me, but to point me at resources that will
help me find out for myself.

Can the Heavens Above astronomy observation site help at all?

http://www.heavens-above.com/

--
Chris