Unknown object seen while Blinking
Stacking program, astrometric (plate) solver, fits file viewer
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I was playing around last night taking images of selected regions of the sky one hour apart with the idea of blinking them to see if anything is moving. To my surprise, I found something iin my second image.
http://www.otherwise.com/ASTAP/UnknownObject.mov
I have downloaded the MPCORB.dat data base and asked for it to annotate objects down to 20th mag. It doesn't find this object.
The "object" has a different quality in the image than stars (or presumably asteroids) so I thought it might be some sort of artifact but I can't imagine a chip artifact that moves like this.
Anyone have any thoughts about it and how I can narrow down what it is?
The "object" coordinates are:
RA: 19 31 18.87
Dec: +28 12 14.2
The image was taken at:
DATE-OBS= '2022-09-04T03:57:31'
Never mind, I figured out that it was a hot pixel (or pixels). It appeared to move because I had "Align Images" selected while blinking. It shifted the image slightly while blinking and moved the hot pixels. If I turn off "Align Images" then the artifact stays in the same position on the screen and the stars shift slightly.
I found the same artifact at that location on other images.
I am calibrating the images (DBFS) so I'm a little surprised this isn't being removed. Maybe my calibration images need refreshing.
Hello Bill,
Sometimes hot pixels can occur random. They can be even blinking like a lighthouse for ships. You can try new darks but for my camera an ASI1600 there doesn't change much over time. As long the unknown object doesn't show some unsharpeness like the nearby stars you can be pretty sure it is a hot pixel.
Cheers, Han