The Asteroid Vesta, For Some Reason It Looks Like A Satellite, Astronomy Sketching Can Be Weird Sometimes
I’ve seen many types of astronomical objects over the years, galaxies, open clusters, globular clusters, and a small few nebula. I’ve seen craters on the moon with hills inside them. I’ve seen the surface of Mars. I’ve seen every planet in the solar system (though I’ve only seen Mercury with the naked eye, and I’ve seen but not sketched Neptune because cloud rolled in). But one of the few things that eluded me over the years was asteroids. And in this, shortly before going into nine years of doing astronomy, the asteroids eluded me no more. (That’s good writing!) Because for the first time ever, and after a few nights of frustration and being cold, I finally saw the asteroid Vesta.
So why was it such a challenge to find? You might think it’s a faint object, and yeah, it’s certainly not the brightest, but that’s not the main challenge. Let me explain by going back to a type of astronomical object that I still haven’t managed to see, comets.
So a few years ago there was going to be a comet visible in the sky (can’t for the life of me remember which one.) And that night there were no clouds in the sky. So great, or so it seemed, I got out the telescope, and as far as I knew was going to see a comet for the first time. But I searched to the point of frustration, and didn’t find it. Was it too faint? Invisible to my eye? No, it was a problem I personally find more frustrating than if the telescope is too weak or the light pollution is too bright to see an object. It wasn’t that I couldn’t see the comet, I could, the problem was, that area of the sky was full of stars (2010 reference there for the sci-fi fans), and the stars didn’t look visually that much different from the comet. I was staring right at it, but didn’t know which was the stars, and which was the comet. So in the most technical sense, I have seen a comet, but it’s like encountering a group of sheep, one of whom is an amazing sheep who has gone on many wondrous adventures, and the rest of the sheep are just, sheep. It would be quite frustrating to never know which one was the wondrous sheep, and it’s quite annoying to never know which of those lights in the sky was a comet.
And that’s why there were a few nights of frustration with Vesta. Let me take you back to the night of the 25th of December (the day the James Webb Telescope was born for those who observe such celebrations) where the frustration began, but it started for a quite different reason.
So, the night of James Webb Day there were few clouds in the sky. Sure, it looked like they were going to roll in soon enough, and they did. But it looked like there would be a good ten minutes to find Vesta, which was near the Orion constellation so I could use that as a reference point in order to find Vesta. But no luck. The reason was, there was a bright moon, and I thought that would make things harder, sure. But the moon was so bright, that literally nothing could be seen in the area of the sky that Vesta was in. So, there was a good chance that that was it, that Vesta would not be situated near another constellation that I could use as a guide for quite some time. But I checked Stellarium, and, no, the situation was not quite as bleak as that!
It turned out that in January (the month I’m writing this) Vesta would be moving up to the constellation of Taurus. And through really good luck, this would coincide with the bright moon fucking off. I don’t know or care where the moon is now, I assume it’s off somewhere obeying the laws of orbital mechanics, what a loser! So I had two of the three pieces of the puzzle (is this a puzzle? I don’t know, I used up most of my writing prowess by being angry at the moon.), that I needed in order to see Vesta. My asteroid friend would be near a constellation that I could use to point the way to it. It would be a moonless night. All I needed was a cloudless sky.
So, some of you who know a bit about astronomy might be wondering one of two things. Firstly, why don’t I buy one of those fanzy gizmotrons that just tells you where all the astronomical objects are? I think for me part of the fun of astronomy is the challenge. Knowing I found Caldwell 30, or I found Messier 64, not it was found for me by a machine. Granted, there are grey areas, my Stellarium app simplifies the process a lot, but even with Stellarium, I have spent many hours searching for various astronomical objects with no luck. So it simplifies things, makes things quicker, but doesn’t do all the work for you. The other thing to remember, is the gizmotrons you can buy (that word is too fun to say I refuse to refer to them as anything else) are quite expensive. And also, there is every chance I will find setting the thing up first day to be even harder than just going out and looking for a galaxy or globular cluster that I’m interested in. I’d rather look for and fail to find a new cluster or nebula than spend the same amount of time failing to set up the gizmotron.
Now, as to the other thing you might be wondering, isn’t there a method of finding astronomical objects when they’re not right next to a constellation, star hopping? I have tried star hopping before, it did not go well. What it is is, you train your telescope on an easy to find star, then you move to a harder to find star, then a harder to find star, until you get closer and closer to the object you’re looking for. I just get disorientated. I tried it and it was hard, much like many aspects of this journey we call life.
So, there were quite a few clear nights in January, so out I went with the telescope. But, for the first few nights, no dice. So I took home a constellation prize by finding the open cluster NGC 2129 for the first time. Not too bad. But I wanted that asteroid.
The reason I was so desperate to bag Vesta was because of a frustration with astronomy that has been building up for about two years. 2020 was great for astronomy, it was my first time properly seeing the surface of Mars, I saw Ganymede casting a shadow on Jupiter, and I saw Caldwell 30, which, at 40 million light years away, is the furthest away object I have ever seen.
2021 saw my usual trip to the low light pollution area of West Cork to be a complete waste for astronomy. I had one clear night, in a month, a month! And during that one night I found nothing. I think I may have got clear skies towards the end, but it didn’t matter, by then the bright moon had returned. But even 2021 was a good year for astronomy despite this, I saw Uranus for the first time, and I saw Iapetus, a moon of Saturn, for the first time.
In 2022 it wasn’t possible to bring my telescope down to West Cork, so the year was a write off, essentially a box ticking exercise, I found one open cluster that wasn’t very interesting to look at, or interesting to learn about, and that was 2022.
2023 was an exact repeat of 2022. Was this going to go on forever? Sure I liked revisting the old classics such as Jupiter, Saturn, the Orion Nebula and the Whirlpool Galaxy, but was I really never going to see a brand new interesting astronomical object again?
So I searched the skies, but at first I encountered the same problem I did with the comet, too many stars around Vesta, so technically I was looking right at it, but it was like trying to pick out the most interesting and courageous sheep among, a group of sheep.
But last night (January 6th) my luck would finally change. There was a bright object not far from the star Zeta Tauri, it looked like this could be it. But no, there was an object of similar brightness in the same area, I would never be able to tell the two apart, one was Vesta and one was a star, but I would never know! Or would I? I looked closer at the other mystery object, and it was a double star. I love double stars, and it’d be worth my time to go back and have another look at it, but at this time Vesta was my goal. So if there were two bright objects near Zeta Tauri, and one I could definitively say was a double star, the other object could only be Vesta. I had found it!
I did a very quick sketch of my new asteroid friend (it’s at the top of this post). I spent less than five minutes I think on the sketch, there were two reasons for this. First of all, it was freezing. Secondly, there really wasn’t much detail to draw. And when you’re sketching a low detail object, I think it’s better to keep it quick, otherwise your sketch becomes a veritable car crash of optical illusions and overthinking. Perhaps I spent too much on this as it was, which is why it started to look more like Sputnik than an asteroid. Also my eyepiece was starting to fog up, meaning soon enough I’d be seeing details that weren’t there, details visible only because of an eyepiece compromised by the cold. So I packed up my astronomy equipment and went back into my warm house, and took it easy for the rest of the night. So, what had I seen?
Vesta is the second most massive body in the asteroid belt, and is the brightest, sometimes it is visible to the naked eye. The Dawn spacecraft visited Vesta in 2011. In 1996, Hubble revealed a crater that was 460 km in diameter, but Vesta is only 530 km across, and is probably the product of an impact earlier in the asteroid’s life.
https://www.space.com/12097-vesta-asteroid-facts-solar-system.html
But I think there is a question we all wonder about asteroids. A question that consumes us day and night, from childhood into old age, a question that haunts us. No I’m not on about whether or not Vesta is going to hit us, it’s not on a collision course with us, not going to happen. I’m talking about the age old question, how high could you jump on Vesta?
Well, this website I found has you covered, and it also covers all of the planets and many of the moons. So you can answer the age old question, how high could you jump on Vesta?:
https://cosmos-book.github.io/high-jump/index.html
Problem is of course, if I lived on Vesta, I would get nothing done, I would just spend all day just jumping. I would not get bored of it! So perhaps it’s better that I don’t live there, otherwise all that would be written on my gravestone is, “Eh, to be honest there’s not much to say, he just spent all day jumping to be honest.” So perhaps it’s better that I live on boring gravity Earth where I’m able to get stuff done!
Ponderings Of An Autist 