RE: (SNES) No Luck with Asteroid 2002 NY 40

["Bartolini, David E (David)" <dbartolini@lucent.com>]

I guess that I was one of the few lucky ones that was able to follow NY40
for roughly 1/2 hour as it passed through Lyra. Here are a couple of things
that I took away from the NY40 search, apart from the fact that NE weather
is not astro-friendly. Given that there was a similar asteroid a year ago
(1998 WT24), I expect that the LINEAR program will find more of these near
misses in the not to distant future for interested observers and imagers to
try again.

1) These NEO's are telescopic and/or photographic objects. They don't really
move fast enough to be observable with binoculars unless the binocs are
mounted and you have a really comfortable seat. They probably have to be
really close and/or really big to be fast enough and/or bright enough to be
distinguishable from stars with binoculars.

2) With a detailed chart in hand, the best way to detect the asteroid is to
park yourself on a field of stars a couple of minutes ahead of the path of
the asteroid, then wait for it to pass through. The perfect star field would
have a couple of bright stars in a line that is perpendicular to the path of
the asteroid. 

3) I found that an eyepiece/telescope combo which yielded roughly a 1 degree
true field of view was a very good setup. My particular setup (with a 38mm
Rini eyepiece) yielded about 66x magnification.

4) This was a very enjoyable object to observe. Even my kids got a big kick
out of watching the object slowly move across the stars. I was actually a
little nervous about how interesting it would be to observe visually. I have
observed a more typical asteroid once (Ceres, I believe), and I can't say
that I plan on spending any energy looking for another asteroid. Personally,
I also lump Pluto and quasars into the category of boring visual objects
(obviously, others may have differing opinions). I can imagine that
asteroids and Pluto would be interesting objects for imagers. Merging shots
taken over several nights make for interesting animated GIFs.

Regards,
Dave B.

p.s. I posted finder charts for this asteroid on other forums. Is there any
way of posting files to this forum?
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