Haumea is a dwarf planet that orbits beyond Neptune. Its orbit is similar to Pluto's (though different in a couple of significant ways). Haumea is smaller than Pluto, though, only about one-third as large. And those studying it report that it is not spherical (as Pluto is) but is flattened in two directions. Haumea was discovered only in 2004.
In my image, Haumea is the short line 55% up and 40% from the left side. That is how much the object appeared to move during the nearly two hours I spent imaging it.
Haumea is very dim. When I took this image, it was only magnitude 17.31. It was nearly 7.5 billion miles away. I identified it by looking at the excellent chart from The Sky Live, the best website I know for finding the location of dwarf planets. I have included a screenshot from The Sky Live, taken at the end of my imaging run.
I have taken images of Pluto and now Haumea. I hope to pick up some other dwarf planets beyond Neptune later.
The small galaxy at lower left is PGC 1519745; it is something like 1.2 billion light years away.
This image was taken with the CFF 290 Classical Cassegrain at f/8.1 in 480" sub-frames (14 sub-frames in all). I took these on a nearly full moon, and I could barely see Haumea in the stretched sub-frames. I'm glad calibration and stacking revealed a bit more!
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