Asteroid 1316 Kasan was discovered on November 17, 1933 by the Russian astronomer Grigoriy Nikolaevich Neujmin (1886-1946). He is credited with the discovery of 74 asteroids, including 951 Gaspra and 762 Pulcova. He also discovered or co-discovered the periodic comets 25D/Neujmin, 28P/Neujmin, 42P/Neujmin, 57P/du Toit-Neujmin-Delporte and 58P/Jackson-Neujmin.
This movie was created from 11 images, each having an exposure of 2 minutes, taken over a 35 minute timespan on the night of 2004-08-19 (around 11PM PST). Each image was taken through an infrared filter. 1316 Kasan is marked at the start of the sequence and can be seen moving towards the West (North is up and East is to the left). At the time the images were taken, the asteroid distance from the earth was almost 1 AU, and its distance from the Sun was 1.8 AU.
The bright star on the upper-left of this movie is magnitude 9 SAO 71737 in the constellation Cygnus. The star immediately east of the asteroid is of magnitude 12.5. Because the images were not obtained using a V filter, but using an I filter, the differential photometric magnitude of 16.2 for the asteroid is not accurate (but it is still close to the expected magnitude of 15.8).
The center of the images as reported by the telescope was RA 21h 48m 48s, DEC +38d 14' 19''. A plate solution found RA 21 48m 43.78s, DEC +38d 13' 30.7''. The image scale is 2.35 arcsecs/pixel (the whole image is about 15' x 10'). During the 35 minute sequence, the asteroid moved almost 21 arcseconds.
The animation is noisy because I did not have matching bias/dark frames, nor did I have flat frames. I downscaled other bias/dark frames, and used strong dead/hot pixel removal to reduce the remaining noise.
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