THE ASTEROID STORY

On the night on October 25th, 1998 I set up for an astro-photo run shortly after dinner with the intention of capturing one of my favorite target types, a fainter galaxy. M74 is one of the more inviting targets during this period, and not in my portfolio. So I set up and shot (2) long 60 minute exposures with the intention of either getting one good one or double stacking both. The film was PPF-400 and I had already used about 10 frames during that dark moon period, so this was to be my last shoot. In addition, I was finally getting the hang of using my 216XT as a standalone guider and also learning proper drift aligning.
The night was clear and seeing was relatively steady, neighbors security lights were to present an eventual problem with the exposures. I did get 2 shots, first exposure at 7:30 EST and second starting at 8:40, both with low numbers on the guider and no error codes.

I dropped the film off the next day, Monday October 26th and picked it up on Tuesday, October 27th. Although I checked the pics over, I was disappointed in the M74 shots because they had a lot of sky fog. I think the security lighting had contributed to the fogging. I set them aside until Friday. That was when I finally took a lupe to the exposures and the negs......and here is what I found....(this is an enlargement of M74 region, yellow points to ? object).... 

 

Exposure 1 - 12:30 UT, Oct. 26, 1998                        M74	Exposure 2 - 01:40 UT, Oct. 26, 1998                       M74

 
 If you would like to stop the story at this time and figure out what this is, it is a good test for your analysis skills.

I did some minor processing and combined the images in Corel for this story and this is the result...
 
   
 Anyway...back to the story...I then dug out my old Astronomy Brian Marsden Story and looked up the Web address for the International Astronomical Union (IAU), Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams which is:

 Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams
 
That site contains a description of what to do about potential discoveries, verification, reported, and a whole lot of links to various sites for verifying discoveries, I then cross linked to the Minor Planet Center site which is:

 Minor Planet Center
 
These sites are very important to those with purported discoveries. It is crucial that you undertake any avenue you can to obtain "secondary" and even "third" verification of a potential discovery before reporting it. Actually, the approach I took was to try and  "disprove" my own discovery before involving any other parties. So I accessed the site to check for possible minor planets at:

 Minor Planet Checker

This site was actually set up to check for possible minor planets around Galaxies, as an aid in Super Nova discovery.

So I entered the following into the submit form:
1998  10   26.02   (which is 12:30 am UT on Oct. 26, 1998), M74 as the target Galaxy, 15 arc. minutes radius of search and V=15 (my actual estimated maximum magnitude of the object, based on the photos, was around V=13).

The following was outputted as shown:

 Object designation         R.A.         Decl.      V         Offsets        Motion/hr
                                     h  m            °  '                  R.A.   Decl.   R.A.  Decl.

  (312) Pierretta           01 36.92  +15 47.3  13.0   3.2E   0.3N   0.6-   0.1-

 End of list

BINGO! A hit! But was it my object?
Next I broke out my MEGASTAR, indexed it on the date and time in question, updated the asteroid positions and ran a locate asteroid on (312 Pierretta). I purposely did not check MEGASTAR before the Planet Center because I wanted to cross verify BACK to the map, not the other way! Here is what Megastar showed as a 10 point (1 per 2 hours) position of this Asteroid:

 
 
As can be clearly seen, asteroid 312 Pierretta was just leaving the (5) star asterism and heading toward the center of M74 right at 1:30 am UT on October 26th, if you compare this to my pictures above, you can clearly see that the position is the same.

AND SO THE EXCITEMENT WANES...............

Actually, I am tickled to have gone thru this experience, and was able to follow a methodical process in checking my "potential" discovery. I was able to avoid involving others from having to spend their time and learned valuable investigative lessons along the way. In addition, I now have clear photo examples in my file of asteroid appearance and movement.
 
"The lessons not learned are the only ones wasted"
 
I hope others can gain from my experience.