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"Once In a Lifetime" Asteroid Sighting Monday Night
An anonymous reader writes Tonight, Asteroid 2004 BL86 will make a pass by the Earth at just 745,000 miles away. This should offer stargazers a great opportunity to see the half-kilometer space rock. CNN has some tips on the best method and time to look. From the article: "The best chance for viewing will be from 8 p.m. ET Monday to 1 a.m. ET Tuesday. Asteroid 2004 BL86 is large, and it will brighten, but nonetheless will not be observable with the naked eye. Some astronomy websites say a pair of binoculars could do the trick, but Sky & Telescope recommends at least a 3- or 4-inch diameter telescope. 'One good technique for fast-movers like 2004 BL86 is to identify and lock onto a star along its path,' Sky & Telescope senior editor Kelly Beatty says. 'Then just watch at the time that the asteroid is predicted to pass by that particular star.'"
Does any frequent contributor have more to add to this story?
I might be able to see it through the blizzard here
"The best chance for viewing will be from 8 p.m. ET Monday to 1 a.m. ET Tuesday."
Or, when the big winter storm slams my area making it impossible to see anything in the sky except falling snow.
Thanks, Mother Nature!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Will it be visible through a blizzard?
Sort of. Haley's comet only comes around every 75 years, so for most of us that's a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
However, there are oodles of asteroids and comets out there, so in general you will have plenty of opportunities in your lifetime to see some. So feel free to get some sleep tonight if you need to.
I wonder why the summary let us think the CNN article is giving good tips while the real tips are coming from Sky and Telescope's website. It is a waste of time to refer people to the CNN article. Aren't we on a website for nerds or not? Here is the link: http://www.skyandtelescope.com...
Achille Talon
Hop!
Yes. If you gaze upon the heavens at the exact right moment... sorry, you still die at some point. This is not any exception to the turning of the wheel.
As for the claim in TFS, this asteroid isn't even visible. I've seen better.
to wipe the snow off your lens first.
You mean Y*hw*h is going to smite us with this asteroid like he smited the godless dinosaurs?
Time to break out the Nikes and the poisoned applesauce and leave these physical shells to beam up to the mothership!
Did he have you set up camp on the wrong side of a mountain? I live on the outskirts of an urban area with a population of over 2 million, with all its attendant light pollution, and have watched meteor showers from my back porch before.
Did your job have you spending a lot of time staring up at the sky?
If so, were you using an image intensifier, or something else that lets you see things too dim for the naked eye?
I agree that it's silly for CNN to encourage non-enthusiasts to go out and look for this. It won't be hard for any amateur with clear skies and a small telescope, but for anybody else, (a) they're likely to miss it, and (b) they're likely to be underwhelmed if they do see it.
But "believe in this crap"? Do you think asteroids are some sort of Illuminati lie designed to keep us in line?
A comment by me nine years ago on Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
"... So, what is a bottleneck is that we do not know how to make that seed self-replicating factory, or have plans for what it should create once it is landed on the moon or on a near-earth asteroid. We don't have (to use Bucky Fuller's terminology) a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science that lets us make sense of all the various manufacturing knowledge which is woven throughout our complex economy (and in practice, despite patents, is essentially horded and hidden and made proprietary whenever possible) in order to synthesize it to build elegant and flexible infrastructure for sustaining human life in style in space (or on Earth).
So that is why I think billionaires like Jeff Bezos spending money on CATS [Cheap Access To Space] is a tragedy -- they should IMHO be spending their money on DOGS instead (Design of Great Settlements). But the designs can be done more slowly without much money using volunteers and networked personal computers -- which was the point of a SSI paper I co-authored:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... 2001_web.html
or a couple other sites I made in that direction:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
http://www.freevolution.net/
My work is on a shoestring, but when I imagine what even just a million dollars a year could bring in returns supporting a core team of a handful of space settlement designers, working directly on the bottleneck issues and eventually coordinating the volunteer work of hundreds or thousands more, it is frustrating to see so much money just go into just building better rockets when the ones we have already are good enough for now."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
We ought to nuke that thing as a trial run if we ever had to for real
I bet you could see that!
The asteroid the dinosaurs spotted was certainly "once in a life-time".
Table-ized A.I.
I'm in the Northeast and this *&%!@ snowstorm is keeping me from viewing the stars.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Holy hyperbole, Batman! Are you sure it's not the Democrats doing it so that people waste their nights and end up getting fired from their jobs for being late/tired and have to go on welfare? What about the Libertarians? They could be doing it because....oh, who the hell knows why Libertarians do things. I hate all the parties (even the little ones that just want to make shit better) because they're all corrupt and because it makes people who don't have a fucking brain in their head feel superior when they can blame the other side for all the world's woes. I'll tell you the same thing I told the people saying that they can thank Obama because their physician doesn't prescribe narcotics anymore: get your shit together. All political agencies and parties are corrupt, but none of them are competent enough to have the wide reaching effects that they are blamed for. They're bumbling idiots.
You're making a political issue where there isn't one. Bad reporting? Yes. Political in nature? Probably not. Does politicizing a non political article make you an inbred retard hell bent on looking as stupid as possible in every situation imaginable? Abso-fucking-lutely.
my guess is its the same AC who posts how everything is the republicans fault in everythread. especially threads that have no politics attached to them, like this one. you will always see this trolls post because no matter what it is, he tries to somehow make it the republicans fault
who knows why, maybe his daddy didnt love him enough when he was little (or he loved him too much?)
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Same as it ever was....
I got a telescope for Christmas this year. I live in a dark area with a really nice open sky with a lot of stars visible. I setup my $300 telescope. Totaly unimpressed. Instead of seeing a small white dot with my naked eye, I now can see slightly larger white dots through the telescope. Planets are no better, just a different color. The moon, yeah, that's cool and has some detail but $300 to look at that all the time is a waste of money.
That user has posted that story several times before on other stories about meteor showers. The user is either a troll, blind & untrusting of the sighted, or just really stupid.
You don't need a meteor shower to see meteors, just time and a really clear sky. They show up in photos quite often if you take long exposures. But a shower saves you a lot of time, when it can be one every minute instead of every hour (depends on viewing conditions, can be much faster than that too).
Claiming comets can't be seen is the icing on the troll cake, because Hale-Bopp was visible through a window without going outside, and the last visit of Halley would be clearly visible anywhere you could see the big and little dipper.
It's me replying to myself. I'm actually every AC in every thread.
I see these things so last minute - always realizing that the object tracking firmware on my scope will need to be updated in order to track.
If only my system was internet updatable directly to the scope. Gotta find my Serial to USB connector :-(
Radar imaging posted by JPL (http://go.nasa.gov/1thVyOO) reveal the asteroid has a moon.
What's the matter with you people? Don't you know there is a UFO behind the asteroid.? Time is close. Gotta make us some purple Kool-Aid for the trip. Bye
Lol, you made my day with that post
a mere 500 meter rock more than three times the distance to the moon, appearing as a speck in any telescope under $8,000.....why bother
:(
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Nearly every astronomy event of my life with a few exceptions has been once in a lifetime missed by clouds.