| 2005 RV24 was discovered by LINEAR
on 9th September 2005 then picked up three days later with the 1.2-m
reflector on Haleakala Hawaii as part of the NEAT survey. After
appearing on the NEO
Confirmation page further observations were reported on 13 September
by James
McGaha in Tucson and Robert
Hutsebaut, operating a telescope in New
Mexico remotely from Belgium. MPEC
2005-R58 was issued later that same day announcing the discovery.
It had passed Earth 5 days before discovery, tracking through Cygnus
at magnitude +17, some 29 times further away than the Moon. It is an
Apollo asteroid, with high eccentricity and a small perihelion distance
of 0.18 AU, nearly twice as close to the Sun as Mercury. Heading swiftly
south, fading and in conjunction with the nearly full Moon on 15th
September, the object was caught from Great Shefford on the night of 14
September and the unusual shape of the Saturn Nebula was immediately
apparent in the images.
In the co-added exposures used to reveal the NEO, the image of the
planetary nebula is burnt out, so the inset has been processed by
averaging rather than adding the 45 constituent images together. A
logarithmic image stretch has also been used to enhance the fainter
parts of the nebula.
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