Close Approach of 2023 FM

[Dennis]

The weather turned out better than the forecast, so I set up for 2023 FM.

With the almost full Moon nearby, the relatively low altitude and shooting into the Brisbane light dome 2023 FM appeared quite faint at around mag. 14.8 initially, making it a little challenging to recognise. Adding to that, a thin layer of fog crept in which I only noticed when my camera fogged up, which at -10 Deg C, precipitated ice crystals inside the sensor chamber, so I had to raise the temp. to +5 Deg C to melt this. Unfortunately, I ended up with a lot of in-camera image artefacts from these, that morphed over time as the temp changed, so Flat Fields could not fix this.

However, Integrating the stack of 25 (out of 27) frames using the STD DEV Method made these go away, albeit producing a very contrasty image as all the darker pixel values tended to clump together.

I have attached a Full res 1600x1600 crop and the Full Frame, down sampled to 1600x1069 to show the position od 2023 FM in the Frame, right where ST4 predicted it would be.

The following data is a Copy/Paste from the FITs Header from the QHY268M Bin 2x2 for Frame 01 and Frame 027.

The locked-on Tracking on 2023 FM series spanned the local Brisbane times:
Start Time: 10:42 pm
End Time: 10:56 pm
Gap 01: 10:46 pm
Gap 02: 10:51 pm

NEO_2023FM_Light_2x2_L_30.000secs00000001.fit
OBJCTRA      '13 14 34.998'      / SBIGFITSEXT The right ascension of the center o
OBJCTDEC      '+12 46 23.84'      / SBIGFITSEXT The declination of the center of th
LOCALTIM      '4/04/2023 10:41:51.200 PM STD' / Local time at exposure start
UTC: 2023-04-04T12-42-50Z
LST          '+11 44 23.94'      / Local sidereal time
2023 FM Coordinates.
RA (Topocentric): 13h 15m 40.8s
Dec (Topocentric): +12° 39' 06"
RA (2000.0): 13h 14m 30.8s
Dec (2000.0): +12° 46' 34"
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
NEO_2023FM_Light_2x2_L_30.000secs00000027.fit
OBJCTRA      '13 14 55.080'      / SBIGFITSEXT The right ascension of the center o
OBJCTDEC      '+12 52 53.66'      / SBIGFITSEXT The declination of the center of th
LOCALTIM      '4/04/2023 10:55:58.380 PM STD' / Local time at exposure start
UTC: 2023-04-04T12-55-58Z
LST          '+11 58 33.45'      / Local sidereal time
2023 FM Coordinates.
RA (Topocentric): 13h 16m 00.7s
Dec (Topocentric): +12° 45' 51"
RA (2000.0): 13h 14m 50.7s
Dec (2000.0): +12° 53' 19"

Cheers

Dennis