Starship Asterisk*

I have been trying to sharpen my astrophotgraphy skills, and have been shooting frames from here in Cincinnati for the past few months. I have done some prime focus, projection, and just simple tripod shots. After becoming frustrated with my Celestron Nexstar 114 GT's tracking(or lack thereof), I was taking short exposure tripod shots of some of my winter sky favs. As a goof, I framed Sirius and proceeded to take a number of 5 second exposures with a dark frame every 4 frames. When I brought the images in to fiddle with ABE, MaxDSLR, and Photoshop...I saw a very odd object in the Sirius frames. The object was moving in the opposite direction of the celestial background, and at what appears to be a fast clip. I did not shoot in RAW(a first), but I have the sequence available for anyone who wants a closer look. I took the sequence and made an animated gif illustrating the movement of the object at my best estimation of actual speed, by adding up the exposure lengths.
http://www.nerdpatrol.com/sirius_object.gif My first guess was that it was a satellite, but I checked on Starry Night 6 Pro and Stellarium with the time and date set to the correct time that I was out shooting and theres was nothing shown. Here is a close-up of the object as well.
http://www.nerdpatrol.com/sirius_closeup.jpg Anyone have any ideas? Thanks.

AJ

The color suggests to me that it is a possible comet though I don't know what is in that area or if there are any that move that fast. I'll be curious to see what it gets identified as.

Whoops. I guess I wasn't as thorough as I should have been. I was able to find and track the object today. It was a very small blip in SN6 and I must have missed it. It is a satellite, designation AOA 2. Mystery solved.

Hello AJ, I know its late as your post is almost 4 months ago. I was curious about the Celestron Nexstar 114 GT tracking performance. I do about the same thing ( Astrophotography ) up in the Northwest on Marrowstone Island northwest of Seattle very near Port Townsend Wa.
I used different equipment, the LXD75 10" Schmidt Newtonian on a equatorial mount with autostar go to and the 497 handbox controler backed and proccessed by a custom high performance lap-top. Im not real experienced with it yet as I just bought it last year and were having unusual weather. It seems to track very well with really no backlash at all
but the main optical tube isnt the most stable thing in the world. Tolerence in the gears on both axis can be adjusted either way, but information and tech support isnt anything to bragg about. So I just try to here all the feed back I can weather the same or not. It all may apply somehow. Would love to hear whats happening with your configoration.
Jerry

The tracking on the 114GT for viewing purposes is not bad at all, for photography, not too good. First, the F ratio of the scope is so slow(half that of your SN10). So exposures are longer, ISO higher, and images suffer from field rotation, making accurate tracking even more critical. The Alt-Azimuth method of tracking will only work well if you have a very fast scope, but we're talking in $10,000 range. You're existing setup is actually ideal. I have since that post upgrade to an LXD75 SN-8, but chose a different mount, as the Meade LXD75 mount got some poor reviews and the amateur community doesn't speak too highly of it either. I went with the Celestron CG-5 ASGT. There were some reasons I went with it, and one was that I liked the tracking on the Nexstar. If I had my druthers, I would have gotten an Atlas EQ-G or a Vixen. The OTA we both have is not perfect for photography, but it is well suited, fast F ratio, the Schmidt plate compensates for coma, and I have been blown away by my views of the Moon, Mars, Saturn(7 moons as well), and finally Jupiter last weekend(with 4 moons, 2 in transit). I have managed some fair pics, the bands of Jupiter stand out, Saturn's rings have visible divisions, I have a 4 shot mosaic of the moon at 4mm barlowed at 2x. On my very first night with the scope and mount together, I got some amazing shots of M42 in Orion, I had been trying for months with the 114 to no avail, and I nailed it with the first light on the SN-8. In a final note..I went all out on my laptop as well thinking the bigger the better. Not so IMHO. It seems that some of the older laptops that were top of the line then are a little better suited. Plus they are cheap, to fix and/or replace. Email me for more info or inf you want to see some of the pics. ajsilverman@htomail.com