Asteroid No 1

This was a bit of a diversion. Whilst I believe I have Vesta in a widefield shot taken sometime last year when it was near Jupiter, I didn't have a good enough star map to get a positive ID on it. I've been exploring Stellarium recently and have found that it's excellent at Asteroids, while my Starry Night Backyard isn't. So, armed with this information I noted that Ceres is currently in a part of the sky that I get a good view of circa 2000, so I built a stack of four, enough to give some noise reduction at ISO3200 and voila!



If anyone with a better star map wants to check this please do, but I think that's right.

Paul
did you ever try to load the latest MPC data into starry night? Sure, it mightn't work with the backyard version but it might be worth a try.

For those asteroids with well defined orbits, it wouldn't be worth it but if you were interested in more recent discoveries or NEO's, it would be worth it. The MPC provide the list for all the popular programs.

One final package you try is Astrometrica. Its tricky but will identify asteroids for you. Free for 100 days & only a minimal registration fee after that.

Cheers

Dave

Thanks Dave, I'll have a look at both of those options!

The thing with Starry Night is, I have quite an old one (3.1) and a more recent one (4.5) - both run like stuffed pigs on my Windows Vista equipped laptop. I'm not at all convinced by Vista overall, although I was able to make a Toucam work when some say it can't be done!

The key to performance with Vista and XP is RAM. Lots of it. I have 2 GB in my laptop and I took out one DIMM to see how much of a difference it made - it was horrible. Put it back in and bingo - it flies again.

On the subject of software versions I've also noted that sime older programs running in compatibility mode suffer whereas the upgrade versions run better. This is particularly true for graphics. I upgraded to Starry Night 6 Digital Download and it's fine; however be warned that the installation bundle is bug-ridden.

I switched to the digital download version of Starry Night because the last copy I got on media had to be sent to me three times - and from the three shipments I was lucky enough to be able to make up a full set of readable disks. It could have gone on forever judging by the lack of quality control.