From Martin Brown@21:1/5 to All on Mon Dec 20 11:27:55 2021
A friend doing photometry on Nova Cass 2021 caught a passing probable
NEO in the field of view at 1830-1835 GMT on Friday 17th December.
Was anyone else in Europe imaging that or M52 at about the same time and
if you were please check for a streak of a 12th magnitude object. It was travelling almost perpendicular to the line between Nova Cas 2021 & M52.
Scout only offers A10DSV5 as a possibility at that declination but the
hour angle is out by 12 hours! It was travelling approximately 1 degree
in 5 minutes judging by the exposure times. Too slow to be in a normal satellite orbit but also too fast to be very far away from the Earth.
Anyone have confirmatory observations - parallax from another site would
go a long way to determining how near or far the thing was. The
observations as they stand are too short a timebase to work out
plausible orbital elements to find it again.