Asteroid Haumea (136108), Kuiper Belt
Our solar system does not end behind Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, because far out, many billions of kilometers from Earth and the sun, lies the Kuiper belt, in which up to 100,000
objects cavort. One of the largest of them is an asteroid with the melodious name "Haumea", which was discovered in 2005 and runs on an elliptical orbit around the sun. Currently,
Haumea is near the aphelion of its orbit at a distance of 7.7 billion kilometers. For one orbit it needs more than 285 years.
The diameter of the celestial body is 1700x2300 kilometers - so Haumea is not spherical like the big planets, but a so-called ellipsoid, similar to an egg. Moreover, it rotates quite fast
around its own axis. One day lasts only 4 hours. Temperatures so far from the sun are of course freezing cold, below -230°C. Haumea is surrounded by a 70km wide ring, furthermore
it is orbited by 2 moons, which are between 150km and 300km in size.
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Although Haumea is quite large in comparison, it appears extremely faint due to the very large distance. Currently the brightness is around 17mag. So to see this object you need a
very dark sky, at the same time a very good seeing and of course accordingly much aperture. Also important is a very accurate chart. Thus equipped I went to my observing site in
April and waited until Haumea had reached a sufficiently high altitude. I was a little bit excited, because Haumea should be the most difficult object I wanted to observe with my
20" f/3 Dobson telescope. Eventually the time came and I was able to slew the telescope to the position of Haumea. Then I memorized the position of the object exactly and pulled
a black cloth over my head. The minutes passed, but there was still nothing to be seen at the position I was looking for.
At some point, for a tiny fraction of a second, an extremely faint star flashed at the location of Haumea, which immediately disappeared again into the darkness. Again the seconds
and minutes passed and with time I could now see the little star flashing more and more often. A positive sighting of Haumea! Wow!
What a beautiful moment to have seen this small and icy world in the outskirts of our solar system with my own eyes!
