Vesta and Ceres, 17 June 2014
The two largest asteroids, Ceres and Vesta, are heading for a close conjunction in mid July 2014. They are both too faint to see with the naked eye, but are easy targets in binoculars, near the fairly bright star Eta Virginis (which currently forms a nice triangle with Mars and Spica, as shown in this image). The asteroids will continue to move closer to each other over the next few weeks.
Incidentally, NASA's Dawn spacecraft is currently on route from Vesta to Ceres, where it will arrive in 2015!
For this image, I stacked 20 x 2.5 sec exposures (plus 10 corresponding dark frames) taken with my Canon 50D and EF35mm f/2 lens at f/2.8 and 1600 iso, using DeepSkyStacker.
Vesta and Ceres, 17 June 2014
The two largest asteroids, Ceres and Vesta, are heading for a close conjunction in mid July 2014. They are both too faint to see with the naked eye, but are easy targets in binoculars, near the fairly bright star Eta Virginis (which currently forms a nice triangle with Mars and Spica, as shown in this image). The asteroids will continue to move closer to each other over the next few weeks.
Incidentally, NASA's Dawn spacecraft is currently on route from Vesta to Ceres, where it will arrive in 2015!
For this image, I stacked 20 x 2.5 sec exposures (plus 10 corresponding dark frames) taken with my Canon 50D and EF35mm f/2 lens at f/2.8 and 1600 iso, using DeepSkyStacker.