In the wee hours of the morning on Oct. 8th I was wrapping up an imaging session of M24 when I thought it would be worth a shot to see if I could image LCROSS. I knew it was going to be a longshot since the waning gibbous moon wasn't too far away at that point, and LCROSS itself would probably be close to 300,000 km distant by then. Still, it was worth a shot so I hopped on JPL Hoizons to get the latest ephemeris and punched in the coordinates. I couldn't get a guidestar to lock on stably so I went for 60 second exposures and didn't see anything. I punched in Rigel, which was nearby, and took a reference image right where the goto landed. I then went back to the latest coordinates for LCROSS and waited for the time on that coordinate to match the time on atomic clock sync. Click, wait 90 seconds, still nothing obvious, click again, wait 90 seconds, still nothing. When I got inside and downloaded the camera I realized there was something there after all, it was just very, very weak. I subtracted some darks, some bias frames, filtered out the background light in IRIS and played with the levels.

Here's a gif showing LCROSS one day prior to its fate, right on course. The bright star is my reference image showing where Rigel landed, hypothetically where LCROSS should have appeared in the image when I clicked the camera the first time, which corresponds to the higher position of the yellow circle.

Image stats:
90s exposures with a Canon XTi at ISO 1600 on an 8" LX200 unguided.

Rats...this browser man!

Nice description, NGC, I'll have to wait till later to see.

__________________
clear skies

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. CARL SAGAN

Mak: Pass the pepperoni please.
Fazor: "Hail, Bautainia! We pledge our hearts to thee! Science and woo, some babbling too, and astron-oh-meee!"
slang: And it made ash out of yew and tree.

Nice catch. I was going to give it a try but clouds had other ideas.

Rick

Thanks! Clouds kept me from trying this during a close approach pass. I would have loved to see your setup tackle it though.

any images of impact?