Yale Students Capture Asteroid On Film

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."

Comments

We need more eyes on the skies

[marcsiry]

The state of near-earth asteroid detection is pretty pitiful. We need years of warning if we're to divert an asteroid, not days.

Asteroid hunting should be part of the basic curriculum for astronomy programs, if it isn't already. Multiply a half dozen students by every university in the world and you've suddenly increased our detection capacity by several orders of magnitude.

Re:We need more eyes on the skies

[IXI]

Multiply a half dozen students by every university in the world and you've suddenly increased our detection capacity by several orders of magnitude.

Wouldn't help much if they are looking at the sky with naked eyes. I bet the bottleneck is the number of appropriate telescopes not the number of watching eyes.

In response....

[p_trekkie]

...to everyone who commented on how faked the movie looks.

Yes, you could do the same with photoshop... Or better, just look at Star Wars. But most asteroids (and most everything within the solar system other than the planets) are nothing more than little dots on a black field. Contrary to popular belief, much of astronomy is not about pretty pictures.

As for the stars not moving, I'm not familiar with the set up of the Kitt Peak telescope, but they most have some sort of sidereal rate drive motors installed. There isn't much astronomy one can do with a streak.