Aster Observatory · One night on Skarvfjell · Scroll
Chapter one · Dusk
The dome opens at 19:42.
The shutter takes four minutes to roll back. In that time the sky above the ridge goes from copper to a bruised violet, and the 1.2-metre mirror begins to cool toward the outside air. Nothing is observed yet; the optics need to lose eleven degrees.
Two operators check the humidity line. At 78 % they close again. Tonight it holds at 61.
Chapter two · Midnight
Four hundred frames of one square degree.
By 00:10 the telescope has settled on a field near Perseus and stays there for three hours, taking 30-second exposures back to back. The moon is a thin sliver low in the west, bright enough to matter, not bright enough to stop.
Each frame is 62 megabytes. Each one is compared to the last, looking for anything that moved.
Chapter three · Dawn
Something moved between frames.
At 04:20 the pipeline flags a point source that shifted 3.1 arcseconds between two exposures an hour apart. The operators look at it for a long time. It is faint, magnitude 21.3, and it is exactly where nothing was catalogued.
The sky is already turning. They get eleven more frames before the background swallows it.
Chapter four · Noon
A provisional name, and sleep.
The report goes out at 09:15. By noon three other stations have found the object in their own archives, and it has a designation: 2026 SK4. It is about 140 metres across and will pass at nine lunar distances in March.
The dome is closed. The mirror is warming back up. The operators drive down the ridge in daylight.