Near Earth Asteroid 2017VD animation

[lukebl]

Hi folks,

I managed to capture these rough images of asteroid 2017VD last night, which was only discovered 3 days ago, two days after it made a close approach at a distance of 0.03 AU (3.8 million km) from Earth. When I captured these images it was moving at around 8.7" per minute and about mag. 16.8, anticipated to fade to around 21st mag by the end of the month.

It's an Apollo-type asteroid with a diameter of up to 400 metres, with a very eccentric orbit that brings it within 0.1 AU from all inner planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, and within 1 AU from Jupiter. Amazing to think that it's quite big (possibly 20 times bigger than the meteorite which exploded over Chelyabinsk, of which I have a fragment), and was discovered after it had passed close by!

30 second exposures, 2x binning, Atik 428ex, 200mm f/5 Newtonian. The animation is comprised of stacks of 10 consecutive images, stacked in Astrometrica, covering a period of about 30 minutes.

Stack of 25 x 30s exposures, field of view 33 x 24.8 arcmin:

[Davey-T]

Excellent catch Luke, well done.

Dave

[happy-kat]

That's good, thank you for sharing. Looks fast.

[TSRobot]

Great seeing evidence of something new actually going on out there. This is real "as it happened" hot off the press, space news. Want more! 

[sloz1664]

Great images, well worth the effort involved.

Steve

[Tom OD]

Nice video. Looks like it's hurtling past us. 

[ollypenrice]

That is really excellent!

Olly