At its closest approach, YU55 will glide along at one degree every 7 minutes, easily noticeable after a few minutes of observation at low power.
I plan to target selected areas with my GOTO mount, sketch the field, then watch for changes. I may also take some wide-field piggyback stills with the DSLR, but mostly, this one will just be fun to watch. The asteroid will pass through the constellations Aquila, Delphinus, and Pegasus as it heads westward. Interestingly, YU55 passes within a degree of Altair centered on PM EST only 27 minutes after local sunset, and also makes a very close pass of the star Epsilon Delphini during closest approach.
On an approach as close as this one, two factors muddle the precise prediction coordinates of the asteroid; one is the fact the gravitational field of the Earth will change the orbit of YU55 slightly, and two is that the position will change due to the position of the observer on the Earth and the effect of parallactic shift.
Many prediction programs assume the Earthly vantage as a mere point in space, fine for positioning deep sky objects but not so hot for ones passing near the planet.
A good place to get updated coordinates is JPL Horizons website which lets you generate an accurate ephemeris for your exact longitude latitude and elevation. Excellent information… many thanks to David for sharing with us! You can read the full article on his website here. And if you do witness the pass of this asteroid and somehow manage to get some photos of it, you can share them on the Universe Today Flickr group … they may be featured in an upcoming article!
Please fix or preferably remove this widget. I agree. This is extremely annoying. If it would actually remember my preference for it to leave me the hell alone while I read the article, I could live with it. Constantly having a window in the lower right corner of the screen growing and shrinking every minute or so is the annoyance. That should relieve your annoyance! At the point of closest approach today at p. The gravitational influence of the asteroid will have no detectable effect on anything here on Earth, including our planet's tides or tectonic plates.
Although YU55 is in an orbit that regularly brings it to the vicinity of Earth and Venus and Mars , the encounter with Earth is the closest this space rock has come for at least the last years. The last time a space rock as big came as close to Earth was in , although astronomers did not know about the flyby at the time.
The next known approach of an asteroid this large will be in NASA detects, tracks and characterizes asteroids and comets passing close to Earth using both ground- and space-based telescopes. The Near-Earth Object Observations Program, commonly called "Spaceguard," discovers these objects, characterizes a subset of them, and plots their orbits to determine if any could be potentially hazardous to our planet. Scientists eagerly awaited the close encounter all the same, since it's providing an unprecedented opportunity to learn more about the asteroid and its orbit.
Photos and videos of asteroid YU55 released by NASA just before and during the flyby revealed the space rock to be a relatively round but lumpy object. The aim is to get a better idea of YU55's size, surface features, rotational period and orbit, researchers said. Astronomers have already determined that the asteroid poses no threat to Earth for at least the next century, but observations made during this close approach should help them predict its movements even further into the future.
NASA has already released a new image of YU55 taken by the big Goldstone antenna, with many more surely on the way. And several organizations, including the Clay Center Observatory in Massachusetts and the online telescope service Slooh, provided live webcasts of the space rock's close flyby.
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