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Asteroid Fly-By on August 18
ke4roh writes "An asteroid will fly near the planet and be visible with binoculars from the northern hemisphere August 18, so says this article. Astronomers say it will cross the sky at 8 degrees per hour and fade out of view as it approaches the sun and hence goes through its various phases - full, gibbous, half... down to nothing. Such a show only comes about twice a century, so take a look before it disappears!"
Another reader sends in a few useful links: "Here's the complete
article
from the folks at
NASA Space Science with extra links including details on the astreroid's
trajectory."
Stellarium is an impressive piece of free software for Linux and Windoze that renders the sky at any given time given your coordinates.
I bet it will make it much easier for the untrained people to find the asteroid in the sky (considering its trayectory.
Anyone here remember comet Hykataki (sorry bad spelling)? Now that was an impressive show! Not only could you see it perfectly with the naked eye, but through field goggles or a small telescope it was truly a grand vision! The only drawback to having seen that is that everything else is kind of a let down... =:::(
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Actually, asteroids pass even closer to the Earth every year; most of them are just smaller than 800 meters. In many cases, we don't detect the objects until after they've gone past.
Here's a list of objects which have come closer to the Earth than 2002 NY40 in the past decade or so. The final column shows the closest approach in terms of the Lunar Distance (between Earth and Moon). For 2002 NY40, that's about 1.3.
You can generate such lists yourself at The NEO Program's list of Near Earth Objects.
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
Asteroids zip by the earth fairly often. You can see the closest ones in the Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) section of the spaceweather.com page.
What is unusual about this one is that it will be 8th magnitude, which will be easily visible in binoculars or a telescope even in a slightly or moderately light-polluted area. Most of the asteroids that zip by are 12th-14th magnitude and therefore only visible in moderate to large aperture telescopes with dark skies.
No, but rapid phasing will be discernable as a rapid drop in brightness, equivalent to apparent albedo drop -- much faster and less linear than increasing distance would account for. (Good point that we shouldn't expect to see the phasing, though. Nice to see back of the envelope reasonableness checks!)
Sigs? We don't need no stinkin Sigs.