Broken Asteroid Trail in NGC 4548

This is a broken asteroid trail crossing the outer regions of galaxy NGC 4548 in Coma Berenices. Five trail segments (shown in white) were extracted from individual exposures and added to a cleaned colour image of the galaxy.

The asteroid enters the image at top center and moves down toward the lower left. Large gaps in the trail occur because the telescope is orbiting the Earth and cannot continuously observe the galaxy.