2010-01-14

Videos Of Asteroid Flyby

A couple of cool videos have been released of the flyby yesterday by asteroid 2010 AL30, which passed within 80,000 miles of Earth at its closest point.



This first one is pretty faint, but it was very small. What you are seeing is an object no bigger than 36 feet across! There is a lot of speculation around at the moment that the object is man-made, possibly a rocket body. One astronomer claims that it is the booster stage of Venus Express, launched back in 2005. Without any decent up close and personal imagery, it will be almost impossible to tell.

The second video is a GIF image composite of 30 still images taken by astronomer Patrick Wiggins who used a C-14 telescope to track the oject. Longer exposure time blurred the stars but made the asteroid brighter.


Patrick Wiggins incredible image sequence

And finally this is a cool video animation showing the view of Earth that the object would have had as it buzzed us.



Happy Viewing, Spacers!

SpaceHead
Image credit: Patrick Wiggins
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1 comments:

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