"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.'"

Comments

That's a lot of lifetimes

[T.E.D.]

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.

Re:That's a lot of lifetimes

[T.E.D.]

lol. Of all the "yeah but" comments I got, this is my favorite.

I still have 2 issues here though. 1: That's gonna be a pretty small minority of Slashdot readers (barring disaster). and more importantly 2: You left off the "that we know of". There are far more such objects out there that we don't know about than ones that we do. Admittedly, that's an unimportant distinction if you need a lot of advanced notice to see it. However, we discover more all the time (perhaps every day), and 12 years is a pretty large amount of days. This one, as the name implies, was only discovered 10 years ago. So if you'd tried to make such a statement 12 years ago in 2003 about the next chance to see one, you would have predicted wrong.