[meteorite-list] Aussie astrophoto of beta Octans (not meteor)

From: Rob Matson <mojave_meteorites_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2009 14:55:46 -0700
Message-ID: <GOEDJOCBMMEHLEFDHGMMAEGLDOAA.mojave_meteorites_at_cox.net>

>>Excellent work, Rob! What says the fellow who took it now that he
knows it's not a meteor?<<

> To be fair...Chris had a big hand in it too.

Yes, Chris gave me the heads up that someone had made a new post
to the thread on Ice-in-Space earlier today with the astrometric
solution. So the real credit goes to someone named James from
Melbourne, Australia, for being the first (that I'm aware of) to
determine that the bright central object was beta Octans. All I
did was confirm it by pulling up the Octans star field, matching
it to the image, and determining likely candidates for the
half-dozen dimmer star streaks.

Originally I thought that the stationary dots in the image were all
hot pixels, but Chris corrected me on this. While many of them are,
the larger ones are indeed stars. I was thrown off by the fact that
this particular star field has no stars of intermediate brightness.
Just one bright star (mag +4.14), and over a dozen much dimmer ones.
In fact the next brightest star in the image is magnitude +8.98 --
over 85 times dimmer!

--Rob
Received on Sat 29 Aug 2009 05:55:46 PM PDT