Asteroid 6632 Scoon traverses the Helix Nebula (Niall MacNeill)

Asteroid 6632 Scoon traverses the Helix Nebula

Can you spot 6632 Scoon traversing NGC 7293? I found it when doing a noise assessment comparing RBI pre-flashed subs with the standard ones. I had both for this object. As I zoomed in I saw a spot in one but not the other. After some further investigation I found it in 18 Luminance and 5 Red filter images (10 mins exposure each) and it was clear that is was an object moving across the face of the nebula. The transit occurred over 4 hours 20 mins, so I knew it wasn't a satellite. The change in brightness of the central part of the Helix Nebula reflects the change from the Luminance to the Red filter.....the central part of the nebula is blue-green, thus dark in red.

An astronomer friend Maxim Usatov kindly offered to identify the asteroid from a single FITS image from the video. These are his notes:
"You have two inner Main Asteroid Belt bodies here. The bright one is (6632) Scoon. The fainter one is (132173) 2002 EU22. There is also 2000 WL2 in the top-left corner (as in the FITS file) from the outer Main Asteroid Belt.”

It is now an IFO

6632 Scoon was discovered by Edward L. G. Bowell on 29th October 1984. It is indeed in the asteroid belt, with an apoapsis of 2.7 Astronomical Units(AU) and periapsis of 2.12AU, which means its orbital eccentricity is 0.12. It has an orbital period of 3.75 years. The orbital inclination is 7 degrees.

I used the Lighten function in Photoshop to select the brightest pixels across the images and thus show up the transit in a single image which is shown in Version B.

Final
Original
B

B

Description: Using a Lighten stacking mode to show up the asteroid track over the 4+ hours of the transit capture.

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