Pluto

Now officially called a 'dwarf planet', Pluto is still considered by many people to be a part of our planetary system and is still often referred to as the 9th planet of the solar system. While I consider the new designation to be correct, due to the many similarities between Pluto and the other Kuiper Belt objects, I still wanted to image it for my collection of astronomy photos. When the pictures below were taken, Pluto was passing by a star that was much brighter than most others in its area of the sky and this made the location of Pluto much easier to pinpoint. Using a star chart published in the July 2010 issue of Sky and Telescope, I waited until Pluto was quite close to this 8th magnitude star and on September 10th, I used the C-14 and the ST-8 camera to take a 450 second exposure, which was eminently successful. On the next night, realizing that it was not necessary to expose for 7 1/2 minutes, I took two images, one of 50 seonds and one of 150 seonds, and combined them. This image was subsequently darkened a bit to match the first one. Below each image is a cropped portion showing the dwarf planet and how much it moved during the ensuing 24 hours, thus proving the identification of the object on the photos.