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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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
Delta IV Heavy + deep impact targeting system + B53 = 9MT wherever you want it on the asteroid. The B53 is already hardened for use as a bunker buster so as long as you can keep relative velocity at impact similar to the reentry speed it was designed for you don't have to worry too much about where you land it on the asteroid.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.