Asteroid 2012 DA14 will pass the Earth on Friday. At around 7.30pm GMT it will be as close as 17,200 miles to the Earth.
The asteroid will be very faint, it will be thousands of times fainter than Jupiter and 250 times fainter than the stars of the Plough. However if you live in a part of the world where it is dark enough at the time the asteroid passes you should be able to see it with a good pair of binoculars or a telescope.
To find out where the asteroid will be in the night sky then check out the HeyWhatsThat: Close Asteroid Approach. The app uses two Google Earth plugins to show the path of the asteroid. You can set your location on one Google Earth plugin and the asteroid's location will be shown on a map of the night sky. A time-line beneath the map allows you to check the asteroid's position at different times.
3 comments:
Thanks for picking this up Keir.
Two important notes: the purple X on the globe is where the viewer is located, NOT an apocalyptic prediction, and the asteroid image appears ten thousand times larger than the roughly 50m asteroid that's approaching us (and the image is in fact of a different asteroid named Ida).
View upcoming and past eclipses with the "Other eclipses..." dropdown menu.
MK
To get RA/Dec and az/alt of points in the sky, add "?radec=1" to the URL: http://www.heywhatsthat.com/eclipse.html?radec=1
MK
May be a mistake while calculating date of 21.12 .2012 there is a difference of two months only , calculated 5000 years ago
Post a Comment