Kuiper Belt Object Photos August 2005

The following are two CCD images of the recently discovered 2003 EL61 taken 24 hours apart on August 8th and 9th. I used a Meade LX200 F/6.3 SCT coupled with an SBIG ST-9XE camera to take the shots. Both images consist of five 30 second exposures that have been stacked. EL61 is indicated with the red arrow, and you can see the movement in the intervening 24 hours relative to the background stars. The streak in the left imageis a satellite that passed through the field of view on one of the exposures. I had some occasional high clouds and more turbulence the second night - hence the reason the object and the fainter stars are less visible in the second image. The two images bracketing the web page title above give you an idea of the relative size of EL61 against some other recently discovered solar system objects (photo from Sky and Telecope), and their orbits. For further information peruse the web pages of the two groups that independently discovered EL61: http://www.iaa.es/%7Eortiz/brighttno.html and http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/2003EL61/.