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Yale Students Capture Asteroid On Film

Posted by timothy on from the well-digital-film-anyhow dept.

netringer writes: "Two Yale University students used the WIYN 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory to capture a series of still images of asteroid 2002 NY40 on August 15-16, two nights before it made a close flyby of Earth. The still images were made into a cool digital movie that shows the asteroid streaking across the sky over a period of two hours. According to an AP story the students were supposed to looking at some binary stars when they decided to look a the asteroid instead."

7 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. More links... by countach · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here is a link offering more info on NY40, and some more info here. And there is a video here.

  2. Re:Alt movie by coryboehne · · Score: 3, Informative

    A slightly higher quality movie is available at astropage Slashdot them too!! lol.... You know someday the government is going to start calling the slashdot effect a weapon of mass denial..

  3. here's the gif ;-) by tanveer1979 · · Score: 5, Informative

    here is gif of the same in case you dont like quicktime ;-) hurray

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  4. Links to more video, still photos by north.coaster · · Score: 4, Informative

    The folks at Yale were not the only ones looking at the sky that night. SpaceWeather.com has some links to other images here.

    /Don

  5. Re:We need more eyes on the skies by p3d0 · · Score: 4, Informative
    Two things:
    1. Asteroids that will hit us are not travelling straight at us. You seem to be under the impression that the earth is motionless, or perhaps that we're sitting on some sort of record player that makes us revolve about the sun while the asteroid comes carreening straight for us. The truth is that asteroids (and everything else in the solar system) are in elliptical orbits around the sun. It's a matter of determining whether the asteroid's orbit will intersect ours. In fact, an asteroid coming straight along our line of sight would almost surely miss us.
    2. Regardless, you don't find an asteroid that's going to hit us by looking for ones coming straight at us. You look at their orbit long in advance, calculate where it will be weeks/months in the future, and see if it's within a dangerous distance of Earth.
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  6. I work across the hall from these guys . . . by Betelgeuse · · Score: 4, Informative

    . . . and they were on a long-ass observing run and decided it would be fun to take some exposures of the asteroid. The movie on the NOAO site doesn't really do the original images justice, but our sysadmin won't let me put up a larger animation in order to see if our system can survive a slashdotting.

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  7. About the WIYN 0.9m telescope by ChrisDolan · · Score: 3, Informative

    For the curious, are are some factoids about that telescope.

    * There is NO film involved. This telescope has been purely digital for quite a while.

    * It was the KPNO 0.9m until it was sold to the WIYN (Wisconsin, Indiana, Yale and NOAO) consortium. since NOAO runs Kitt Peak, this means that the telescope used to be 100% accessible to US astronomers, and now 60% of its time is dedicated to observers at WI, IN and Yale (which is cool for them!).
    * As off the last time I checked, it boasts shared use of the biggest digital camera on the mountain: 8192 x 8192 pixels (on 8 2048x4096 chips)
    * It was built in the early 70's IIRC. It is run by a PDP-11 with Forth software.
    * For some of it's computer parts, there are no more spares anywhere. When they die, it's upgrade time.
    * It is right next to the WIYN 3.5m telescope
    * The dome roof gets frozen open or shut in the winter sometimes, despite being in southern Arizona.

    * I spent about two weeks at that telescope, about half of which was cloudy...
    * Here's the type of picture that 8192x8192 camera can take (before a lot of postprocessing): the Orion Nebula (shrunk to 1270x948) http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/thesis/trap.gif
    * It has a pretty nice stereo system, but not as nice as the one at the 3.5m telescope (Klipsch speakers!)
    * It's a fun telescope to use.