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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."
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.
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.
Here is a live feed of the Asteroid event...
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
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.
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.
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.
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
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!