Reply To: Interstellar asteroid A11pl3Z

I’ve been doing some astrometry on 3I/ATLAS and have been surprised how much scatter in the magnitude that I’m getting day to day. The plot of magnitudes from MPC astrometry data also shows a huge scatter. This data doesn’t have a consistent photometry aperture or filtering but, for most observers at the moment 3I/ATLAS is a point source so it is surprising. The scatter may be due to measurement errors in the crowded star field but it is worth making estimates of the magnitude if you can.