Asteroid APOPHIS and animation, 5th March 2021

[lukebl]

Hi folks.

Here's a capture from last night of this earth-crossing asteroid, scheduled to have a very close pass again in 2029.

Firstly, apologies for the horrendous gradient on the images. There was some stray light coming from somewhere, and I was sumultaneously enjoying a party via Zoom, and the jovial ambience and wine meant I didn't take it seriously enough!

Anyway, as you may know, Apophis was discovered in 2004 and it was briefly thought that it might collide with earth in 2029. It's 370 metres across, so would do a fair bit of damage, but latest calculations show that it'll miss by a few thousand kilometres. Close enough to get to magnitude 3 though, and maybe knock out a few satellites. Last night it was at its closest on the current approach, at around 44 times the distance to the moon, and around mag 15.5

200mm f/5 Newtonian, Atik 383L+ cam, binned 2x, 15 second exposures. No darks or flats.
This is 50 x 15 second exposures, stacked on the asteroid using Astrometrica.

Heres an animation, made from 10 x 15 second stacked frames, with intervals of 6 minutes between images. Note the visitation by some of Musk's Starlinks on the left-hand side.

And here's another animation centred on the asteroid (the asteroid's the stationary dot in the centre).

[Tiago Ferreira]

Very good!

[happy-kat]

that's really good

[Paul M]

That's a very nice presentation.

 

[Davey-T]

Excellent Luke, was hoping to catch it with the SCT but too much cloud.

Dave

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Nice work and well presented. I don't think the gradients matter at all for a shot like this, if anything they help give a sense to the movement.