Earth "grazer" 2008AF3
I wanted to get this guy as he passed by at closest approach on the 13th. But it was snowing. Last night about 11 UT it finally cleared enough for me to get it. One problem. Orbital elements I'd gotten earlier in the evening were already wrong. I checked again with the Minor Planet Center and new ones were up. These worked. But it was moving so fast just trying to intercept this guy wasn't easy. I had to work ahead of it and let it come to me. Here's 10 minutes tracked on the asteroid. It's the dot in the center. Image scale is 1.5" per pixel. This guy was moving nearly .6 seconds of arc per second of time. North is up, west to the right in this image. It was in the middle of Bootes when taken. It will be in Serpens Caput by the time it rises late tonight. It was about 435,000 miles away when this was taken, still rather close. It came within about 230,000 miles, a bit under .0025 AU.
14" LX200R, 10 minutes, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME
Rick
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