its about a very close (533,000km away) 50m asteroid passing by us. Just wondering if anyone has seen this or knows if it is observable in the sky tonight and where it may be? I only have a dob with no tracking so if anyone could help it would be most appreciated.
It is moving pretty fast across the sky, is not very bright, and will be rather drowned out by the Moon. You can use this in Stellarium to simulate it.
They are interesting to find - you need to get the local position (ephemerids)from the Minor Planet Center (MPC) for every 15 Min's or so when you plan to observe, and point your scope in advance and wait...
I made the mistake yesterday of assuming that a planetarium program could plot the position, but they don't tent to account for parallax due to the closeness of NEO, so are rather inaccurate for them.
Nope I definitely missed it.
Here is a rough miss chart.
My DSI field is the red rectangle
The 3 rough plots are 1 min intervals.
Do your homework Steve!
Cheers, it's just a shame that the Qld wet continues and I can't get any more footage
I found it interesting that I started to get latin comments on youtube - turned out that it got used on some Argentinian and Peruvian on-line newspapers.
