The second largest asteroid, Vesta, is "close" to the Earth right now, as it orbits the Sun. Kind of like Mars will be at the end of July. They say that it can just barely be detected with the naked eye right now. Well, the sky was clear last Monday, so we zoomed out to a dark site to see what we could see.
The moonlight was interfering until it set around 23:30. Then the clouds swarmed in. So we didn't get to see Vesta with the naked eye. We observed it in binoculars though. I snapped a couple pictures with the zoom lens at about 200mm. You'll need to click on the thumbnails to see much of anything in these images.
The darker picture is a 58 second long exposure and shows fainter stars than we could see in the binoculars. The lighter picture is 96 seconds long and is starting to show the Milky Way star clouds. By now, Vesta will have moved towards the upper right side of the frame. If we ever get a cloud free night, I'll want to check it out again.
Oh, and that clump of stars to the upper left of Vesta is M23.
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