I woke up this morning a little after 3, and looked out the window to discover a clearing in the clouds! So I quickly went out to the dome and opened things up.
My main objective was to sight a Near Earth Object (NEO) asteroid named 2004 XP14. (What a cool-sounding name!) This asteroid made a very close pass to the earth this morning, coming at somewhere around the earth-moon distance. Not threatening, but close enough to notice. The really cool thing was the amazingly fast apparent speed in the sky for earth-bound observers. At the time I was watching it, my software told me that the speed was over 12 arcseconds per second, that's easily fast enough to see the motion in the eyepiece. Earlier in the morning it was trucking along at a much faster pace.
I did manage to catch it but I wasn't able to keep it - unfortunately the twilight starts very early here so I only had a short time to watch. Also, the clouds moved back in and by 4:10 the combination of twilight and clouds made it impossible to see anymore.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment