Asteroids in the field of Messier 74

A collection of named and unnamed asteroids passing through the photographic field of the spiral galaxy Messier 74 in Pisces.

• Comments:

I was originally intending to do a complete reshoot of M74 to replace a prior version of less than ahem, stellar quality. Gremlins being what they are, I didn't get set up in time for starters and even once I finished up, the seeing was absolutely abysmal. Just about the time we were thinking of packing it in for the evening, the skies steadied up and there was enough time to shoot a luminance-frame set. Better than nothing as they say. While working up the individual datasets and paging through them, I noticed an object moving. Closer inspection showed three fairly bright objects and three dim, which at first glance might be geosynchronous satellites. Well, being as it is easier to check for objects like asteroids in Skymap Pro than satellites, I pulled down a copy of the latest asteroid orbital elements and opened the search as far as I could stand it. Bingo! The three brightest objects turned out to be named asteroids (26768 4608 P-L, 66296 1999 JM29 and 68139 2001 AV24). The three dimmer objects, two of which are barely visible near the top center of the image and the third just to the left of the small galaxy in the lower right-hand corner, are not in the database. It's not uncommon to pick up an asteroid or two on occasion but hitting as many as this in one session is jackpot time.

North is to the left in this image set.