Hello,
On the eve of Earth Hour, whilst most of Australia was asleep, I was alone in my back garden, searching for the ghostly trail of the Near Earth Asteroid 2012 EG5. This 60 metre chunk of rock was scheduled to approach our home, the planet Earth, well inside the orbit of our Moon.
Alone but not lonely, my Celestron C9.25 and EM200 mount were purring along, tracking 2012 EG5 as it flitted through the camera field, a few hours before its closest encounter. As the clock ticked over into 1st April, the estimated magnitude was approx 14.4, as the rock fast approached the Earth.
The closest point is predicted to be 0.6x the distance to the Moon, or approximately 230,640 km early evening on April 1st, 2012 (Brisbane) and this is to be no April’s Fool hoax – it’s for real! The average Earth-Moon distance is 384,400 km.
The actual position in the sky seemed to be approximately some 20 arc mins ahead of the calculated position in my planetarium program, possibly a parallax error due to how uncomfortably close 2012 EG was, as I peered along the line of my telescope. There was also a slight offset between the actual and predicted path.
Running a simulation on my planetarium program (The Sky X Pro) for the closest encounter later this evening, indicates that 2012 EG5 will be moving through the frame at least 5x faster; each 5 min trail in this earlier image being traversed in less than 60 seconds! A true celestial sprint!
I have attached a composite Trail, a screen capture from The Sky X Pro and the obligatory Animation.
Cheers
Dennis
