The picture was taken right at 8:48 p.m. HST and the exposure was about one minute long. I could have left the shutter open much longer, of course, but that would have only made the stars brighter, not the spacecraft, and I decided not to do that. I intend to include another image of the same part of the sky below taken later the same evening but with a longer exposure, for comparison.
The first image is a jpeg file that I've cropped to show a portion of the sky from the head of Perseus over to NEAR. The spacecraft is the dim blue line near the bottom and to the right of the picture. The image is probably too big, but if you scroll all the way down and all the way to the right, you can easily see it. Using Photoshop, I was able to zoom in on this portion of the image and see the "slash" quite well. For reference, the brightest star in the upper left corner of the picture is Mirfak in the head of Perseus. This file contains 315939 bytes.
This image shows the spacecraft after zooming in on my highest resolution picture, and cropping it to only show a couple of stars near NEAR. Notice that NEAR flashed twice, once for a short period of time and then again for a longer time. I would estimate that the first flash lasted only about ten seconds and the second about 20 seconds, but it's hard to be more accurate.
This image is the same picture as the first, but is in GIF format. This file contains 529117 bytes.
This image is a longer exposure of the same region but does not contain the NEAR spacecraft. The file contains 213242 bytes.
I intend to add some more images here as I play with them, so check back later for different images.
My e-mail address is `sam@perseus.hcc.hawaii.edu'
My snail mail address is:
Samuel E. Rhoads
Division of Science & Mathematics
Honolulu Community College
874 Dillingham Blvd
Honolulu, HI 96817