"Once In a Lifetime" Asteroid Sighting Monday Night 59
An anonymous reader writes Tonight, Asteroid 2004 BL86 will make a pass by the Earth at just 745,000 miles away. This should offer stargazers a great opportunity to see the half-kilometer space rock. CNN has some tips on the best method and time to look. From the article: "The best chance for viewing will be from 8 p.m. ET Monday to 1 a.m. ET Tuesday. Asteroid 2004 BL86 is large, and it will brighten, but nonetheless will not be observable with the naked eye. Some astronomy websites say a pair of binoculars could do the trick, but Sky & Telescope recommends at least a 3- or 4-inch diameter telescope. 'One good technique for fast-movers like 2004 BL86 is to identify and lock onto a star along its path,' Sky & Telescope senior editor Kelly Beatty says. 'Then just watch at the time that the asteroid is predicted to pass by that particular star.'"
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Yes. If you gaze upon the heavens at the exact right moment... sorry, you still die at some point. This is not any exception to the turning of the wheel.
As for the claim in TFS, this asteroid isn't even visible. I've seen better.
If I have a really long telescope... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If I have a really long telescope... (Score:5, Funny)
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Best Chance For Viewing (Score:5, Funny)
"The best chance for viewing will be from 8 p.m. ET Monday to 1 a.m. ET Tuesday."
Or, when the big winter storm slams my area making it impossible to see anything in the sky except falling snow.
Thanks, Mother Nature!
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It's just a conspiracy to sell milk, eggs, and bread. Go get in line before it's too late!
My 2015 SNOWPOCALYPSE has just been rain so far.
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Did he have you set up camp on the wrong side of a mountain? I live on the outskirts of an urban area with a population of over 2 million, with all its attendant light pollution, and have watched meteor showers from my back porch before.
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That user has posted that story several times before on other stories about meteor showers. The user is either a troll, blind & untrusting of the sighted, or just really stupid.
You don't need a meteor shower to see meteors, just time and a really clear sky. They show up in photos quite often if you take long exposures. But a shower saves you a lot of time, when it can be one every minute instead of every hour (depends on viewing conditions, can be much faster than that too).
Claiming comets can't be s
Re:Interesting how many people believe... (Score:5, Informative)
Did your job have you spending a lot of time staring up at the sky?
If so, were you using an image intensifier, or something else that lets you see things too dim for the naked eye?
I agree that it's silly for CNN to encourage non-enthusiasts to go out and look for this. It won't be hard for any amateur with clear skies and a small telescope, but for anybody else, (a) they're likely to miss it, and (b) they're likely to be underwhelmed if they do see it.
But "believe in this crap"? Do you think asteroids are some sort of Illuminati lie designed to keep us in line?
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Holy hyperbole, Batman! Are you sure it's not the Democrats doing it so that people waste their nights and end up getting fired from their jobs for being late/tired and have to go on welfare? What about the Libertarians? They could be doing it because....oh, who the hell knows why Libertarians do things. I hate all the parties (even the little ones that just want to make shit better) because they're all corrupt and because it makes people who don't have a fucking brain in their head feel superior when they
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who knows why, maybe his daddy didnt love him enough when he was little (or he loved him too much?)
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It's me replying to myself. I'm actually every AC in every thread.
That's a lot of lifetimes (Score:5, Interesting)
Sort of. Haley's comet only comes around every 75 years, so for most of us that's a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
However, there are oodles of asteroids and comets out there, so in general you will have plenty of opportunities in your lifetime to see some. So feel free to get some sleep tonight if you need to.
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It is quite less common that an asteroid of this size passes this close. Yes you can see shooting stars nearly every night but this flyby is maybe worth missing a little sleep if you have the gear and diligence to be able to see it.
It's just sleep anyway...
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Yes you can see shooting stars nearly every night but this flyby is maybe worth missing a little sleep if you have the gear and diligence to be able to see it.
Call me a cynic, but if you can't see it with the naked eye, is it really that interesting?
I'm sure it's maybe a big deal for people with telescopes and greater than average interest in astronomy, but for people not in that category it seems like it would just be one more flash of light through a telescope.
Re:That's a lot of lifetimes (Score:4, Informative)
Sort of. Haley's comet only comes around every 75 years, so for most of us that's a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
However, there are oodles of asteroids and comets out there, so in general you will have plenty of opportunities in your lifetime to see some. So feel free to get some sleep tonight if you need to.
AFAIK, these things don't happen too often. The next big asteroid viewing opportunity is likely to be in 2027 when 1999-AN10 [wikipedia.org] makes a near pass (and should be brighter than 2004-BL86). Although asteroid 2004-BL86 will revisit our neighborhood in 2050, it won't be as close as it will be tonight for another 200 years...
Re:That's a lot of lifetimes (Score:4, Funny)
Re:That's a lot of lifetimes (Score:4, Interesting)
lol. Of all the "yeah but" comments I got, this is my favorite.
I still have 2 issues here though. 1: That's gonna be a pretty small minority of Slashdot readers (barring disaster). and more importantly 2: You left off the "that we know of". There are far more such objects out there that we don't know about than ones that we do. Admittedly, that's an unimportant distinction if you need a lot of advanced notice to see it. However, we discover more all the time (perhaps every day), and 12 years is a pretty large amount of days. This one, as the name implies, was only discovered 10 years ago. So if you'd tried to make such a statement 12 years ago in 2003 about the next chance to see one, you would have predicted wrong.
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Well, what I had in mind was a flyby of an object of a roughly comparable size, and I'm pretty sure that ~0.5-1km sized objects have been mapped pretty exhaustively. So, yeah, there will be a lot of flybys before 2027, but the flybys of things we don't know about yet are bound to be somewhat less significant.
The interesting thing here is the somewhat skewed shape [wikimedia.org] of the size distribution of known NEAs, which suggests to me that the skew due to detectability happens somewhere below the ~300m region. That's w
Real tips are not on CNN... (Score:5, Informative)
Too bad space habitats seeds not yet ready... (Score:3)
A comment by me nine years ago on Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
"... So, what is a bottleneck is that we do not know how to make that seed self-replicating factory, or have plans for what it should create once it is landed on the moon or on a near-earth asteroid. We don't have (to use Bucky Fuller's terminology) a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science that lets us make sense of all the various manufacturing knowledge which is woven throughout our complex economy (and in practice, despite patents, is essentially horded and hidden and made proprietary whenever possible) in order to synthesize it to build elegant and flexible infrastructure for sustaining human life in style in space (or on Earth).
So that is why I think billionaires like Jeff Bezos spending money on CATS [Cheap Access To Space] is a tragedy -- they should IMHO be spending their money on DOGS instead (Design of Great Settlements). But the designs can be done more slowly without much money using volunteers and networked personal computers -- which was the point of a SSI paper I co-authored:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... [kurtz-fernhout.com] 2001_web.html
or a couple other sites I made in that direction:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... [kurtz-fernhout.com]
http://www.freevolution.net/ [freevolution.net]
My work is on a shoestring, but when I imagine what even just a million dollars a year could bring in returns supporting a core team of a handful of space settlement designers, working directly on the bottleneck issues and eventually coordinating the volunteer work of hundreds or thousands more, it is frustrating to see so much money just go into just building better rockets when the ones we have already are good enough for now."
Trial run: Nuke that thing (Score:2)
I bet you could see that!
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We have no nukes that can 'fly' so far ... besides a nuke likely won't even 'hi't it.
If a nuke would work at all, we need a new targeting and ignition system for the nuke (besides a missile to get it there).
Re:Trial run: Nuke that thing (Score:4, Informative)
Delta IV Heavy + deep impact targeting system + B53 = 9MT wherever you want it on the asteroid. The B53 is already hardened for use as a bunker buster so as long as you can keep relative velocity at impact similar to the reentry speed it was designed for you don't have to worry too much about where you land it on the asteroid.
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The relative speed is the problem. The asteroid will pass with something like 30km/sec. That is ten to hundred times faster than reentry of a missile.
And a nuke that kills a bunker, wont really scratch a 'real' asteroid which easy is dozens of km in diameter.
The only technical feasible approach is to hit it so far out that a minimal deflection is enough to have it miles or more away from its original path when it reaches earth.
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According to this study [rand.org] reentry speeds are up to 9.5km/s so keeping relative speed to something in that range should not be hard at all.
A 2km spherical asteroid of average composition will have a mass of ~1.3 x 10^13kg, the energy of the B53 is ~3.8 × 10^16 Joules which for maths purposes we can assume is delivered in 1 second so an an imparted energy of 3.8*10^6N which gives an acceleration away from the blast site of ~2.9m/s^2 which should be easily sufficient to avoid impact if it's delivered with a
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The question if you can get a favorable relative speed is a question of fuel and burn times.
Getting there to hit it, is easy (besides the actual hit) but you likely have to break again to match the speed again, to come down to the 9km/sec you mention.
Not challenging your numerical figures, however a nuke hitting will not even transfer 1 pro mille of its energy to the asteroid. So if your calculation was correct, the speed change of the asteroid is in the range of mm per second, not metes, likely even less.
The wording makes me nervous (Score:1)
The asteroid the dinosaurs spotted was certainly "once in a life-time".
Insensitive clod! (Score:3)
I'm in the Northeast and this *&%!@ snowstorm is keeping me from viewing the stars.
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Then you shouldn't have voted for Obama!
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I didn't! I still can't see the stars with all these clouds and snow.
Water flowing underground (Score:2)
Same as it ever was....
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Atmospheric conditions being the predominant one. Size of scope and quality of optics are another. Light pollution within your viewing area another fun one. North Korea would kick ass for sky observation
For the most part, he's right. Most viewing through a telescope is simply ' bigger dots ' or realizing what you thought was a big bright dot is actually half a dozen small ones. If the planets are visible and the conditions are right, then you can make out s
Updating the tracking firmware now... (Score:1)
I see these things so last minute - always realizing that the object tracking firmware on my scope will need to be updated in order to track.
If only my system was internet updatable directly to the scope. Gotta find my Serial to USB connector :-(
Moon discovered already (Score:1)
pointless (Score:2)
a mere 500 meter rock more than three times the distance to the moon, appearing as a speck in any telescope under $8,000.....why bother
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All I see is snow. (Score:2)
:(
SNOW SNOW SNOW (Score:2)
Nearly every astronomy event of my life with a few exceptions has been once in a lifetime missed by clouds.