On July 16, 2011 NASA’s Dawn spacecraft entered orbit around Vesta and returned some stunning images of this brightest asteroid. With all this hype I asked Bill W. if he could locate the asteroid during the RASCals Star Party. It turns out that's a lot more difficult to accomplish without charts and knowing exactly where to look. Well last night at the VCO I imaged around the known position of 4 Vesta for about 25 minutes. After processing my images I looked for angular movement but could not find anything obvious in my photo (Vesta has a sky motion of about 0.63"/min at this time). I then compared my photo to a sky view using TheSky6 and downloaded an image of the area from the Digitized Sky Survey. After doing that it was fairly easy picking out Vesta. At magnitude 5.7, it is the brightest object in this photo (in the centre).

Date: August 1, 2011
Constellation: Capricornus
Location: Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, Victoria, BC
Optics: Tele Vue NP-127is, f/5.2, used with field corrector
Mount: Paramount ME
Camera: Hutech modified Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Exposure: 17 light frames of 90 seconds, ISO 800
Processing: Light frames calibrated with dark frames in ImagesPlus. Light frames normalized and combined using MinMax Excluded.