Asteroid Phaethon has arrived

[lukebl]

Hi,

Asteroid (3200) Phaethon has been in the news lately. It's a 5 km-wide PHA, the source of the Geminid meteors and currently at its closest for a long time. It passes just 0.069 astronomical units (10.3 million kilometres) from Earth at 23 UT (11pm GMT) on 16 December. Then there’s a 76-year wait when it will attain magnitude +9.4 on 14 December 2093, at 0.0198 astronomical units (2.96 million kilometres or 7.7 lunar distances) from our planet. It's got a highly eccentric orbit with a period of 523½ days that brings it closer to the Sun than any other named asteroid.

For ten nights starting 8 December, it is 12th-magnitude or brighter and well placed in the Northern Hemisphere as it speeds up through Auriga, Perseus, Andromeda, Pisces and Pegasus at a rate of up to 15 degrees/day.

I had a go at capturing it last night, with intention of producing a light curve to show its rotation. Unfortunately gusty winds and passing clouds messed the imaging up a bit, but I did manage to get some captures of it. It was moving at a rate of 5.5 arcseconds a minute, and its motion was very noticeable in only 30 second exposures.

Here's 16 minutes of 30s exposures, stacked in DSS. Field of view about 33' x 24':

And here's an animation. 7 frames, each consisting of 5 stacked 30s exposures.

It really speeds up over the next few days (from Astronomy Now):

[MilwaukeeLion]

Great images, very interesting, thanks for sharing its travel plans as well.

[AstroSylv1]

Wow, very nice job !

[Demonperformer]

Excellent -love the animation. 

[Stub Mandrel]

Excellent!

[Davey-T]

Well done Luke, I fired off a few shots of it in passing the other night but haven't actually got round to looking at them yet

Dave 

[orion25]

Brilliant! The source of one of my favorite meteor showers revealed, haha.