Ida and Dactyl

I don't know what the hell I was doing when I came across a photo on the Internet. How many cool stories start out like that I wonder? Well, out of all the directions I could go with that, I'll let you down easy...here's the picture, taken by the Galileo spacecraft:

This is one of the random things that occur in the universe, and specifically in our Solar System. The large rock is asteroid 243 Ida. She lives in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, which is much thinner and sparse than I used to imagine when I was a kid. The smaller dot is Dactyl, Ida's moon.

Isn't that cool? Am I the only person who hadn't ever really thought about asteroids having moons?

Ida is about 35 miles long with an average diameter of about 19 miles. Dactyl, an average of 50 miles away and taking over four years to make a rotation, is an egg shaped rock with the longest axis 1 mile long.

Astronomers think it's highly unlikely that Ida captured Dactyl, that it makes more sense that it's the remnants of a collision from eons past.

Also, my godfather's mother is named Ida, and one of my brothers once had a cat that had many toes that they named Dactyl.