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 also got some pictures!

[nEoN nOoDlE]

I also took a picture of the asteroid about to hit earth... Here it is

That was no asteroid!!

[DoctorFrog]

I played the movie several times, and there's only one conclusion. That thing was obviously accelerating and decelerating under power!

It seemed to be keeping time to "blue Suede Shoes" too, but that's probably just a coincidence. Probably...

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

[p3d0]

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.

Hmph!

[I Love this Company!]

Making "still images" into a digital movie. Back in my day, if we wanted to see heavens, we had to use Galileo's original telescope model from 1610! And we didn't have movies; each frame had to be hand drawn and the whole stack had to be manually flipped to create motion. Kids today!

--

"All art is quite useless."

Finally..

[batobin]

Finally, astronomy for people such as myself with small attention spans. This is huge! It's just what the science needs to gain entire new audiences.....whoah! Something shiny!

The movie

[Tribbles]

foreach $frame (0..100) {
$image = newImage(128, 128);
$image.plotRandomStars();
$image.plot(10 + $frame, 10 + $frame);
$image.write();
}

More links...

[countach]

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

here's the gif ;-)

[tanveer1979]

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

Links to more video, still photos

[north.coaster]

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

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.

I work across the hall from these guys . . .

[Betelgeuse]

. . . 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.