Alas, this event had some frustrating aspects. First, the path was centrally across Aptos, and the rank was 98% - a "sure thing"! But, it happened in evening twilight with the sun only -11 degrees down. This would give only a few minutes to try and identify and get on the target. But there were more challenges... the star was only 12.4 magnitude, and the asteroid was at 11.1, giving a combined magnitude of 10.8. That's bright enough, but it was in an empty star field which just didn't have any other stars to help verify the right field. With such a tiny magnitude drop of 0.29, it was essential to get a video recording. A visual watch would be useless. The other issue was that the target was deep in the west, where the twilight sky was brightest.

Before leaving home, I sent off an email to Duncan, and also to Sam Jackson. Sam was free, and got to the observatory just before me. I arrived at my office, printed the star charts from Steve Preston's page, including RA-reversed versions of the two largest scale maps, and got to the observatory 80 minutes before the event. Got the scope set up efficiently, and when dark enough, used Vega and then Spica as my calibration stars for the 10" LX200 classic. Pointing was good, and I was able to find the brighter stars around 1 degree away from the target, but I was not able to reliably identify the target itself, nor the orientation I should be expecting.

With 5 minutes to go, I took down the eyepiece and mounted the PC164c-ex2, focused, and slewed again to nearby stars trying now by video to identify the field and orientation... till, time ran out.

Then, a shot (above) of me and Sam (almost looks like we're celebrating victory - nope!), and then I sent the scope to M23 and took a few seconds of imaging in order to determine some parameters of the system.