from the Look!-Up-in-the-Sky!-Faster-than-a-speeding-bullet!-Oh?-Oh.-Oh!-Ooooooh! dept.
An asteroid will be stopping by for a visit around Monday (or Tuesday, depending on your time zone). From National Geographic:
A mountain-size space rock will sail past Earth on Monday, offering stargazers a close look at an interplanetary pinball. Luckily, NASA says there is no risk of collision, but it will be a rare astronomically close encounter that backyard telescope owners can watch.
This will be a rare opportunity to see a bright flyby of a potentially hazardous asteroid from your backyard. For several hours on Monday, [asteroid] 2004 BL86 will reach a visual brightness of magnitude 9. That means small telescopes and possibly even large binoculars will reveal the asteroid—as long as you know where to look.
The asteroid will travel through the constellations Hydra and Cancer in the south-southeastern evening sky and will glide just to the right of a bright celestial guidepost, the planet Jupiter. Between 10 p.m. and 12 a.m. EST [3–5 UTC], it will be making a close pass of the famed Beehive star cluster.
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CNET reports that two asteroids, 2017 FU102 and 2017 FT102, passed the Earth on 2 April and 3 April.
The near-Earth asteroid 2017 FU102 was discovered by the Mt. Lemmon Survey in Arizona (USA) on 29 March 2017. Today (April 2, 2017), it will have a very close, but safe encounter with the Earth (about 0.6 times the mean distance of the moon).
[...] this ~10 meters large rock will reach its minimum distance from us of 143,000 miles (230,000 km).
The other object, 2017 FT102, is smaller and its approach to the Earth was at a greater distance. It was also discovered on 29 March.
[By comparison, the Chelyabinsk meteor was estimated to be 20 meters in diameter. --Ed.]
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by kaszz on Saturday January 24 2015, @04:31PM
The time for the flyby is:
2015-01-26 Monday 03:00 – 05:00 UTC
Provided it happens on Monday as mentioned earlier in the text and that EST is UTC-5. Consistent measure and unit standards seems like a hard area for USA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 24 2015, @10:16PM
took me ages to realise that SN time date stamps were not in something sensible like UTC.
why can't we all just get a long.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Saturday January 24 2015, @10:33PM
When are they? I've never paid much attention.
You don't need to tell me, I mean, this post will. Anyone else looking at this, I'm CST and it's 16:30 local here.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @03:31AM
hi k-aszz!
i'm from mars. your earth units are not standard for me either. luckily, i'm intelligent enough to be able to convert your units to martian units. it is also fortunate for you earthlings that i am reasonable enough to forego insulting your world or attacking it just because it uses different units.
live long and nanoo-nanno!