| Title | Watch Jumbo Asteroid Zip Past Earth | |
| Date | Saturday January 24 2015, @04:15PM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| 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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printed from SoylentNews, Watch Jumbo Asteroid Zip Past Earth on 2024-04-20 15:39:06