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

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.