Video Showing Half a Million Asteroid Discoveries

An anonymous reader writes "Since 1980 over a half million asteroids have been discovered, mostly between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, now thanks to this video you can see this activity condensed into a few minutes. At full resolution it's a mesmerizing experience as new discoveries are added and the video makes it possible to see patterns in the discovery positions, for example a large number appear in line between Earth and Jupiter as astronomers started looking for smaller jovian moons after Voyagers visit to the system."

Cheers, astronomers!

[Aussenseiter]

Celebrating 30 years of counting rocks in space. Here's looking at you, kid.

Re:Needs a caption

[mistralol]

You have worked on asteriods? Was the commute better than the average commute in china?

Re:Needs a caption

[chanrobi]

I have worked on asteroids,

Which one was that?

Gives me a cool idea...

[boneclinkz]

For a potential video game. You pilot a small spaceship, and your job is to shoot asteroids with your laser cannon as they appear. When an asteroid is hit, it breaks into several smaller asteroids. You then have to shoot those asteroids until they break up into asteroids so small that they are no longer a danger. If an asteroid impacts your spaceship, you die.

I think they should call it The Ship that Shoots a Laser Cannon.

Re:Needs a caption

[thechemic]

He didnt really work on asteroids. I think the 'a' in asteroids was a typo on his behalf.

Re:Cpt Obvious Observation

[$RANDOMLUSER]

In other news, most optical astronomy is done at night.

Re:I see you!

[BSAtHome]

Ehm, you mean:
One Oracle to rule them all, One Oracle to find them,
One Oracle to bring them all and with its gravity bind them
In the Oracular System where the asteroids fly.

Next blink, 2012.

[xigxag]

Lookie, you heathen scum! Creationism is vindicated! What's that you see glimmering by the end of the video? It's the eye of God!!! That proves He exists. Y'all scientists done hoist yerselves by your own atheistic little petards, aincha? Gaze into His ocular glory, that greenish, ominous, malevolent, downright wicked...hey wait a second, you're not fooling me, you used summa that false color tricknology to make Him look evil didn't ya?

Next time show us His true colors -- red, white and blue.

Re:"That's some mighty fine science, Lou."

[ElectricTurtle]

Well you see as a marine biologist I thought it would be really ground breaking if I looked for a new species of fish living in the Gobi Desert. After a lifetime of work I'm sorry to say that there just appear to be no fish living in the Gobi Desert. I know I could have taken the easy route and actually tried to study fish in bodies of water, but that would have been so cliche.

Re:Needs a caption

[smitty97]

The possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1.

Re:Gives me a cool idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

I got an idea for the song for you game... it goes like this.

dooot DOOOT dooot DOOOT

Then when stuff starts getting hairy it speeds up, like so:

dootDOOTdootDOOT