Images of Pluto taken during the CLEA 2010 workshop

On Sunday night, June 20/21 2010, we used one of the small 8-inch Meade telescopes and an SBIG ST-402 CCD camera (with no filter) to take images of what we _hoped_ would turn out to be Pluto. Success! Below are two images, each a stack of twenty short 8-second images. The images have had a simple dark frame subtracted from them, but not flatfielding has been applied.

plutostack2.fit (FITS format) starting time UT 2010 June 21 02:50:17
plutostack4.fit (FITS format) starting time UT 2010 June 21 03:05:42

Click on the picture above to blink the two images. Can you find the tiny little dot which moves a little bit relative to all the stars?

Here's the ephemeris from the JPL Horizons system for Pluto's position at the time of the two images, as seen from Gettysburg:

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 Date__(UT)__HR:MN     R.A._(ICRF/J2000.0)_DEC  APmag  
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 2010-Jun-21 02:52  m  18 17 05.40 -18 14 43.3  13.97   
 2010-Jun-21 03:07  m  18 17 05.33 -18 14 43.4  13.97

Compare those to the positions I measured from the images, using the CLEA Astrometry Toolkit (or look at the full report ).

                          RA          Dec
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     C2010 06 21.11897 18 17 05.38 -18 14 43.2          13.6        842
     C2010 06 21.12968 18 17 05.31 -18 14 43.3          13.8        842
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