Large Near-Earth Astroid Will Fly Past Earth On April 19 (phys.org) 44
William Robinson quotes a report from Phys.Org: A relatively large (650 meters) near-Earth asteroid discovered nearly three years ago will fly safely past Earth on April 19 at a distance of about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers), or about 4.6 times the distance from Earth to the moon. The asteroid will approach Earth from the direction of the sun and will become visible in the night sky after April 19. It is predicted to brighten to about magnitude 11, when it could be visible in small optical telescopes for one or two nights. For comparison, Chelyabinsk meteor was 20m. Small asteroids pass within this distance of Earth several times each week, but this upcoming close approach is the closest by any known asteroid of this size, or larger, since asteroid Toutatis , a 3.1-mile (five-kilometer) asteroid, which approached within about four lunar distances in September 2004. The April 19 encounter provides an outstanding opportunity to study this asteroid, and astronomers plan to observe it with telescopes around the world to learn as much about it as possible.
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Yes she wears a strapon.
Re: "visible in small optical telescopes" (Score:4, Informative)
For you as an astronomy major, some freshman definitions:
* Meteoroid: something that flies through space.
* Meteor: something you see in the sky as it is burning up in the atmosphere.
* Meteorite: something you pick up from the ground, after it survived burning up in the atmosphere.
Therefore, logically, people who think that they can see meteors are not delusional because that's exactly how meteors are defined.
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Maybe you could give them some leeway. What they actually see could be an artificial satellite zooming by, it's just that those people don't know what they are looking at and make assumptions.
https://www.spaceanswers.com/a... [spaceanswers.com]
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Aww, someone has been spied on while having quality time with his hand.
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So-called amateur "astronomers" are a sorry bunch of autistic, antisocial losers who don't know what they are supposed to be doing. The media is also to be blamed for overplaying their questionable "contributions to science". The fact is, the ordinary citizen has no business owning and operating a telescope. Time to put an end to this.
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I always cringe when I hear people claiming they saw a planet or a meteor.
(looks down)
Hey, I saw a planet!
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Seriously? When I see Jupiter (which is coming up right around dark, the brightest thing in the sky to the west besides this week's full moon) it doesn't seem that scary. Why do you cringe? Venus is quite beautiful as well. With my 10" scope I can take Saturn -- easily seen with the naked eye -- and magnify it to where we can see its rings and moons. As for meteors, I remember lying out on a dry lake bed far from city lights during one of the better meteor showers -- can't recall any more which one
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I always cringe when I hear people claiming they saw a planet or a meteor.
Why? A number of planets are often quite clearly visible in the night sky. Likewise, it's not unusual to see meteors/shooting stars/whatever you want to call them, especially during 'storm' periods like Leonids, Perseids, etc.
Re:"visible in small optical telescopes" (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you just trolling? Meteors, as in "shooting stars", are obviously perfectly visible with the naked eye. It's actually much easier without a telescope because they're bright enough, happen kinda randomly and sweep a large part of the sky.
If you're talking about asteroids, then you're right that you'd need a telescope to see them. You also can see the bright ones with a wide-angle camera and a long time exposure.
How far will it be from orbital plane? (Score:2)
1.8M km is bit over 16 hours for Earth, given its orbit speed around Sun. Does anybody know how far it would go from Earth assuming we would be in worst place of our orbit or is it actually crossing our orbital plane and timing was all that helped here?
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https://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/aste... [nasa.gov] as a nice animation of the entire orbit.
It seems to have a very high eccentricity and a decently large inclination so it won't have repeated encounters with us. That site mentions that there are no more close encounters until at least 2500.
Normally you could look up exact orbital elements from https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horiz... [nasa.gov] or https://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/orbit... [nasa.gov] but those don't have "2014 JO25" listed. Anyway, it doesn't matter all that much, in orbital mechanics distance
Awww.. (Score:1, Funny)
Earth is not a planet (Score:2)
It seem the existence of asteroids like this indicates that Earth hasn't cleared its orbit and is not a planet.
Earth Impacts (Score:2)
Our civilization only appears to be strong however I think protecting ourselves from threats from these objects is an area where we need to make a lot of improvement. I have a number of these near earth passbys in my memory of the last few years.
If they are increasing then we should be paying closer attention to planning to deflect them. If we are just getting better at spotting them then it just means we haven't been paying attention to the threat and it shows us we should have been figuring out how to do
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dead international agreement
excuse me, posting tired. I meant brain dead easy to achieve an international agreement
Land on it! (Score:1)
"Near" (Score:2)
When someone writes "near Earth", I imagine really close. Am I the only one ?
1.8 millions kilometers still feels pretty far away, even at that scale.
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If I understand it correctly, it missed us by 16 hours. Or, 140 Earth diameters. It doesn't sound THAT far in those terms.
Headline written by an imbecile? (Score:4)
Mother of god, let's have some elementary proofreading of headlines.