Phil Plait has been fighting the woo-woo crowd that is claiming this asteroid, which passes us the 28th (Make that the 29th) at 1.4 moon distances -- twice as far away as 2008 AF3 earlier this month that I posted earlier -- will cause all sorts of disasters here on earth. How they dream up this crap is beyond me.
Anyway, it is supposed to snow the next couple days so last night probably was my only chance to catch this guy. I had to take it low in the SW only 10 degrees above the horizon where transparency is lousy and high clouds made things even worse. Of course they vanished after it set.
It will be moving about 4.8" of arc per second on the 29th at about 10th magnitude at 8:30UT. When I took this shot it was moving only about 0.3" of arc per second at magnitude 16. Most of the mortion was in declination. It's ten 1 minute exposures. A tumbling piece of space junk zipped though one of the exposures on the left. Taken with my 14" LX200R with The Sky providing orbital tracking data to the Paramount. The shot is unguided as I have no guider that can track such a fast moving 16th magnitude object. Camera was my STL-11000XM. There were several galaxies in the field. They're what made the faint fuzzy trails.
The asteroid is moving up and to the left -- north northeast.
Odd how 2008 AF3, which came far closer to us than this rock earlier this month, caused no uproar at all. Must have had a lousy PR man. Or maybe it was the very short time interval between discovery and closest approach. My image of it is at:
Earth "grazer" 2008AF3
Rick