Asteroid to sweep between moon and Earth tonight: How to watch online
Gianluca Masi in ASTRONOMY ESSENTIALS | October 28, 2019
Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project in Rome said he just managed to capture an image of a small asteroid – labeled 2019 UB8 – coming very close on October 29, at about half the moon’s distance.
Gianluca Masi in ASTRONOMY ESSENTIALS | October 28, 2019
Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project in Rome said he just managed to capture an image of a small asteroid – labeled 2019 UB8 – coming very close on October 29, at about half the moon’s distance.
The asteroid is marked by an arrow at the center of this image, taken October 27, 2019, via the Virtual Telescope Project. |
The near-Earth asteroid 2019 UB8 will have a safe, very close encounter with our planet, coming at about 120,000 miles (190.000 km) from us – half of the average distance of the moon – tonight (October 28-29, 2019), according to clocks in Europe, Africa and the Americas. This 14- to 31-foot large asteroid (4.3 to 9.5 meters) will reach its minimum distance (120,000 miles or 190.000 km) from us on October 29, 2019, at 06:30 UTC; that is 2:30 a.m. EDT on the morning of October 29; translate UTC to your time.
We at the Virtual Telescope Project in Rome will show it to you live around its flyby time, beginning at 8:30 p.m. EDT on October 28 (00:30 UTC on October 29; translate UTC to your time).
Of course, there are no risks at all for our planet
We also managed to capture its image last night. The image above comes from the average of three 500-second exposures, remotely taken with “Elena” (PlaneWave 17?+Paramount ME+SBIG STL-6303E) robotic unit available at Virtual Telescope. The telescope tracked the apparent motion of the asteroid. This is why stars show as small trails, while the asteroid looks like a faint, sharp dot of light in the center of the image, marked by an arrow.
The image above is quite exceptional, considering how faint and fast-moving this rock is.
At the imaging time, asteroid 2019 UB8 was at about 1.3 million km (808,000 miles) from the Earth and it was on its way, approaching us.
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