Discussion
Well, I'm giving it a go.
I moved the Seestar to the corner of my backyard so that it would have the clearest possible view towards the southeast, but the weather wasn't really cooperating. I ended up with 77 60 second long exposures but almost all of them were obviously visibly affected by clouds, and I'm pretty sure transparency was pretty bad for the rest too.
I should stick to more realistic targets for my tiny telescope, like supernovae!
Nice clear night tonight and I'm sure that's the supernova in NGC 1433, clearly visible in the live stack image in less than half an hour. The star-like object to the left and slightly above the fuzzy blob (galaxy core) in the centre of the image appears to be in exactly the location marked on the DESI image that was shared by @CosmicRami.
I plan to keep going on the galaxy for about 4 hours tonight so that I can make a half decent looking image of the galaxy itself, but it's cool that I can already see the exploded white dwarf.
#Astrophotography #Astrodon #Astronomy #Seestar #SeestarS30Pro #TMMT #ThirtyMillimetreTelescope
Yeah, I thought I was being overly optimistic!
Taking a quick look at the stacked data in Siril and comparing with the same region in Stellarium I can identify by eye some stars down to magnitude 16.5 or thereabouts, but I can't see anything fainter than that. 2026 ED138 is supposedly in this image but would be more like magnitude 19.7, i.e. about 20 times fainter than the faintest stars that I can see in my image.
Not helping my chances is the fact the 2026 ED138 is currently, from my point of view, passing almost directly in front of a magnitude 12 star which is about 1200 times brighter! Even if did have the sensitivity to detect the dwarf planet it would've been hidden by the glare from the star.
This is definitely a job for a significantly larger telescope, ideally at a much darker site.
Still, a useful learning exercise. I now know for future reference that even in pretty crappy atmospheric conditions my little Seestar S30 Pro can detect objects as faint as about 16th-17th magnitude in an hour or so. This has also reinforced my understanding of how a ~20th magnitude dwarf planet could have gone unnoticed until now. It is in a part of the sky with vast numbers of stars brighter than it is.