On November 1, 2002 asteroid (24560) 4517 P-L was near M74 (seen on the right) in the constellation Pisces (the Fishes). 4517 P-L was its provisional designation from the 1960's Palomar-Leiden asteroid survey. This survey's purpose was to obtain a statistically meaningful sample of asteroids by examining a relatively small part of the sky (216 square degrees) in great detail. Orbital information and magnitudes were obtained for about 1800 asteroids down to 20th magnitude. 4517 P-L itself is magnitude 15.7.

I found a moving object in my raw data from an M74 image set by blinking all the aligned subframes. 4517 P-L was then identified by putting sky location (obtained from TheSky image link) and date / time information into the Minor Planet Center MPChecker page. Information about the Palomar-Leiden survey was found by putting "4517 P-L" into www.google.com and following a bunch of links.

Image calibration was done in MaxIm DL, alignment was done with Mira AP, and animation was done with ImageReady.  The data was rotated about 30 degrees CCW to allow M74 to show up and a cropping to occur to keep the animation file size down. These frames are an animation of 9 ten minute frames taken at f/6.3 and binned 1x1. The data was taken with the 12" LX200, AO7, and ST-8E from my home dome on Mistletoe Rd, Monmouth Oregon.