Shot from my backyard, where it only gets 36° above the horizon. The hover image is the original RGB-only version. Final version has Ha added to fill out the details in the nebulae.
When I uploaded the image to Astrobin, plate-solving showed "431 Nephele 12.93." in orange text. Orange text is always exciting to see because it means an asteroid has photo-bombed your image. While not visible in the final image due to Pixinsight culling it out during preprocessing, I was able to easily locate it in the individual subframes. The two images below are the first subframe taken on 9 July 23 and the final image taken on 16 July 23. That gives you an idea of how far the asteroid travelled in just one week.
I made of
video from my red data since I captured all 171 subframes in one night (see animation at Revision C). The video shows the movement of Nephele over a 3.5-hour period.
Finally, researching Nephele online at
Space Reference and the
IAU Minor Planet Center revealed it to be main belt asteroid that was first observed back in 1897 by Auguste Charlois at the Nice Observatory. Nephele is about the size of Delaware (101.9 km diameter), making it larger than 99% of asteroids, and it orbits the sun every 2,030 days. The rotation of Nephele has been observed and it completes a rotation every 13.53 hours. Below you can see the orbit and relative position of Nephele and Earth back in July around the time I was capturing the data (image courtesy of spacereference.org).
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