Stardust return

After working at it for almost four hours, members of my
Observational Astronomy class look to have gotten an image
of Stardust with our 0.4m telescope, observing right before
0400 UT while it was still something like 160,000 km out.
The detection as finally possible within 20 degrees of the
horizon (of course, looking right over the lights of the
stadium, being used for something I was unaware of).
A typical photometric zero point for our site gives
a V magnitude of about 18.0, which explains why we could
never pick up its trail without tracking at the right
rate.

Bill Keel