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Up-Front Seats For Tonight's Near-Earth Asteroid
spineas writes "In case you're not in a prime viewing position for tonight's fly-by of Asteroid 2000 EM26, never fear, for the event will be webcast live for all around the world to see. The Orlando Sentinel reports that the Slooh Space Camera will be broadcasting the 3-football-field-long asteroid as it zips by us at nearly 27,000 miles per hour. Astronomer Bob Berman will be answering questions during the broadcast, submitted via Twitter with the hashtag #Asteroid."
Thank you for being a friend
Traveled down the road and back again
Your heart is true, you're a pal and a cosmonaut.
And if you threw a party
Invited everyone you knew
You would see the biggest gift would be from me
And the card attached would say, thank you for being a friend.
3 football fields? For those of us in the rest of the world who've abandoned the beta measurement system, what's that in elephants?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
How about listing a goddamn date and time—including a time zone (e.g., -0500)? Even a Unix timestamp would be acceptable.
Seriously, I have no idea how you people manage to get by in life.
37,000 of your "miles" per hour is, in normal person units, 12km/sec.
Anyone with a 4-6" telescope should be able to see this if they're in a good viewing location. Tracking it might be a bit more difficult without computer assistance, but it shouldn't be prohibitive. Even at the speeds it's traveling, the distance alone makes the movement seem a bit slow.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
http://events.slooh.com/stadium/potentially-hazardous-asteroid-zips-earth-canary-islands-february-17-2014
There's a countdown. About 4 hours from now. It's in the link. On the first page.
Here is a live feed of the Asteroid event...
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
Oh my god.
3 US football fields, or 3 soccer fields?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The clouds around here were kind enough to break earlier. Hopefully that holds. It's been a pleasure to watch the ISS fly over from my back yard several times, and it's wet my appetite for more.
Well I was on a website, hitting the refresh button watching an asteroid, while a bigger one hit without us seeing it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I want to buy a milion seats so I can sell them to Bible thumpers who think that God is going to destroy us because of Obama or abortion or gay marriage or whatever - stupid people deserve to be ripped off. All the mega churches prove it.
Welcome to the strange land of Britain, were we use metric for distances less than a kilometer and mile for those above, therefore we measure speed in miles.
We weigh our food in grams and kilograms but weigh ourselves in stones and ounces.
When it's hot a lot of us (older generations) will use fahrenheit, but when it's cold out comes the celsius.
But we will happily have a go at Americans when they decide to use imperial units.
...that that fucked up the Mars Climate Orbiter.
Pick a set of units, lazy asses.
1331461 is only semiprime *sigh* Alas - I am just short of 1337.
There are large asteroids passing near the Earth fairly often - this particular asterioid, 2000 EM26, will get only 8.8 Lunar Distances (LD) away. One that is more than three times its size, 2006 DP14, passed closer at 6.2 LD last week. Check out www.spaceweather.com for a list of recent and future NEAs, plus lots of other stuff.
If it were a large asteroid passing within the orbit of the moon (< 1.0 LD), now that would be worthy of a broadcast event like this.
also, distance not given, over 1.5 million miles, not that close. Wake us up for something inside lunar orbit
Yes it's the closest approach, but it's still going to be 3.2 million km away. If the Earth were the size of a basketball, the asteroid would be 560 feet away and only 1/5 the size of a pixel in an iPhone retina display. The 0.017 arcsecond angular resolution requires a 6.6 meter telescope to see more than just a point of light.. And as for "hurtling past Earth" as some reports say, if it were heading straight for earth at 27,000 miles per hour it would take 73.5 hours or more than 3 days to get here. In our scaled example it would be travelling at a whopping 0.00255 km/h, under 1/10th the speed of a garden snail. The asteroid should have close to the same visibility for many hours around the time of closest approach. Right now (5 hours before) it could at most be 2% smaller through a telescope..
I think it's cool, I just wish the articles wouldn't hype so much and would include more context.
U.S. Microbrews vastly outweigh beers from other parts of the world, just by sheer variety - in the evolution of beers, the American beers now breed at the frequency of a mayfly so we now have beers that fill any possible evolutionary Beer Niche you can imagine.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Trying to find if it was visible in Denver, I found instead the information we all really wanted to know - it's visible in Australia.
I guess that explains why the article link is to a webcam site.
On a side note, I think it's sad that the solar system economy is so bad even the asteroids are setting up Cam sites.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Great view of the Service Unavailable page.
quack-quack!
The Slooh Observatory video feed got thoroughly Slashdotted. It's totally inaccessible.
Why isn't there a peer to peer video streaming software package optimized for live video? Asymmetric broadband sucks, but almost every broadband connection can accommodate at least one outbound video stream. Sure, if you were far enough down the chain, "live" turns into "live with delay", but who's going to notice? So why hasn't this been done?
3-football-field-long asteroid as it zips by us at nearly 50x the speed of commercial airliner
and you are doing sunday-newspaper pop-sci, or use actual units:
1000 feet long asteroid as it zips by us at nearly 27000 miles/h
and qualify for pop-sci column in illustrated weekly. Don't mix the conventions!
2 million miles away - more than 8x as far as the moons distance
earth diameter 8000 volume at edge that asteroid passed -- 4 million 500x500x500 roughly 125000000th of the volume or 250000th chance if taken as a flat gun target
the size of a period dot on the full screen you are likely looking at now
more interesting would be how long ago was it detected and what might have been done (if anything) to stop it if it was coming anywhere near the earth ?
surely you mean 'Metre'. My electricity is measured by a 'meter'.
shouldn't we "kill" any rock zipping near earth if it is half way technologically feasable? either "kill" or capture ...
stands to reason that "it will be back" non?
That would roc!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."