Thursday 6 June 2013

Asteroid 1998 QE2 drifts silently by

Here's around 50 minutes of footage of the asteroid 1998 QE2 drifting by us on the evening of the 2nd of June. I recorded 10 second exposures with intervals of 30 seconds on the 20 inch telescope, as the 11th or 12th magnitude asteroid culminated in the southern sky, in the constellation of Libra. You will see the imperfections in the tracking of the stars, and the apparent rotation, as the mounting is Alt-Az (altitude-azimuth, i.e. up-down left-right). The field is about 38 arc minutes across. The asteroid is quite large, much larger than the actual QE2, so it's a good job it passed a few million miles from us. Look out for the 'flash' of a (man-made) satellite trail and a(nother man-made) geostationary satellite near the end of the sequence. The geostationary satellite appears to move but in reality the right-to-left motion is because the stars are being tracked.

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