Does this help more than just finding them?
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by
dfitzpatrick
This one is going through a big star. Is the info any better than just finding one? Or now a days doesn't matter?
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by
grums
Not sure what you mean df. Do you mean the appearance of a black dot (2 pixels) on the big star in frame 3? If so, that probably isn't an asteroid but could be some other artifact, maybe due to the brightness of the star overloading the detector array. I am uncertain whether anything small would be seen passing in front of the very bright star because of the atmospheric dispersion of the very bright light from the star. Without the atmosphere, and with the wide aperture telescopes used, stars would be seen as much smaller - certainly much smaller than the image we see on these pics. Brighter stars would still appear bigger than dimmer ones because of the limitations of the telescope's aperture (the finite sized circle is known as the "Airy Disk") but not as big as in these ground based images where it is the atmosphere that results in the large size. This same effect would tend to swamp any small dark object in front of the star.
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