He took a picture of Shoemaker-Levy breaking up and impacting Jupiter which was so good that a publisher bought it and it appeared on a nationally sold calendar, the astronomy calendar sold in your local supermarket. I was impressed.

He also had a program which scanned the skies for movement, hoping to detect a new comet or asteroid. He set it up and turned on the thing for overnight and immediately found an uncharted object moving against the background.

Wow, I thought. You’ve got something named after you.

Not so fast, QuickDraw. I don’t remember where I had the telescope focused. It was just a test run, first time I used it.

Oh, well.

I also had other great advantages: a wide field
(100mm f/6) objective, an equatorial mount, and a correct-image erecting prism that allowed me to see an image that was left/right and up/down correct. It made matching up what I saw through the eyepiece and what was on the chart much easier. I don’t have a clock drive on my scope, so I had to be constantly adjusting in RA.

It took two evenings of set up, learning an obscure field of dim stars. I use a 2″ 30mm objective to give me a wide field because of the 1200mm focal length of my C11.

I set up that night with the given path of the asteroid right in the middle of the eyepiece. With an eye on my “atomic clock” on the observatory wall, I glued myself to focuser 3 minutes before it was due. I was thrilled to see a pinpoint light enter the field. The rock must have been tumbling because it’s brightness varied regularly. I was treated to an 8 second show, then it was gone. I can’t tell you how excited I was. I was the only one in the “CloudyNights” forum in the Seattle area that saw it.

Don’t give up ER, they’ll be others. And you’ll be around to try again.

I picked it up about 10 PM, EST, on my lowest power eyepiece, 24X on my 4″ Equatorial refractor. It was so faint I could barely see it, I had to use averted vision, and it kept popping in and out of view as the seeing changed. I couldn’t really tell for sure if it was there, and I kept wondering if I really saw it or if I was just making it up because I wanted to see it so bad. But after following it for an hour, I was sure it was real. A lot of the field stars were on the chart, and it went down to my limiting magnitude which made it a lot easier, and it was easy to verify its position. It moved very slowly, you couldn’t tell it was in motion unless it went very near a star, or if you could line it up with geometric figures of star combinations, and it kept popping in and out of view. Every time I used the flashlight to look at the chart I lost my night vision and it would take me a few minutes to get it back. About 11 PM the temperature started dropping and the seeing improved, and the object was higher in the sky, so it became continuously visible without averted vision, but still extremely faint. I never would have noticed it unless I was looking for it and knew exactly where and when to look. I went to my 18mm eyepiece (33X) to increase the sky contrast, and that helped it stand out. By midnight, there was no doubt about it, a tiny speck of light, very slowly moving amongst the stars. I was following it pretty confidently now, so I risked using the Barlow (66X) but the extra magnification didn’t help much.

Around midnight it was getting too cold to stay out, I really wasn’t dressed for it, so I called it a night. It was just getting into the outer regions of the Beehive, when I shut it down.

A mountain-sized boulder, a planet-killer, three quarter of a million miles away. Wow.

My razor-sharp, infallible scientific reasoning tells me THAT’s why I didn’t see the asteroid. It didn’t show up late, I showed up early.

No excuses, the Universal (Greenwich) time and date were correctly printed on the online Sky and Telescope chart. I just screwed up, the usual confusion when you’re thinking about events near local midnight, with the new day racing across the Atlantic. I’ll try again tonight, but this time, I’ll haul out the big scope–weather permitting.

I explained the whole thing to Mme Reclus this morning, after the morning news did a story on the upcoming encounter. She just shook her head, rolled her eyes, and solemnly muttered “Enzyme breakdown.”