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

I thought it was pretty cool

[gasgesgos]

i wonder how many sattelites get smashed by these metoer showers each year...

Re:Damn, it's Quicktime

[kasperd]

It plays just fine in xanim. IIRC the source for xanim is available.

Re:We need more eyes on the skies

[coryboehne]

If I'm correct wouldn't it be near impossible to tell if we really were on a collision course with an asteroid? After all, we are used to seeing video like this of a passing asteroid, and due to the fact that they are passing we are able to perceive movement relatively easily, however were it bound straight for earth the object would not appear to move, only to slowly get bigger and brighter.

Another shiny astronomy thing

[cstrom]

http://astrowww.astro.indiana.edu/personnel/strom/ saturn/

Contains movies of Saturn's moons that I made back when I was a grad student.

Re:Is it for real???

[LMCBoy]

Yes, telescopes track the sky. They have to, because astronomers like to look at really faint things, so they have to expose for a long time.

If the telescope has an equatorial mount (like the 0.9 m WIYN telescope they used), then you don't get any field rotation while tracking. A horizontal mount (like almost all recently-built telescopes have) does give you field rotation, but the computer can simply counter-rotate the detector to correct for it.