Saturday, February 9, 2008

Another NEO coming close tomorrow, one more already gone

There's a lot going on in near-earth space these days (with 2008 CT1 and 2007 TU24 making headlines recently), simply because there are quite a number of productive searches going on. The latest finds are 2008 CF22 which will approach Earth to 560,000 km (0.00377 AU) at noon UTC tomorrow (Feb. 10) and measures 15 to 50 meters, leading to a maximum magnitude of 15 (right now), and 2008 CE22 which passed us late on Feb. 6, closing in to within 385,000 km (0.00258 AU) and also reaching 15 mag. with a diameter of 10 to 30 meters. (All calculations done immediately before posting with JPL's Horizons online calculator; Hohmann Transfer also keeps track of near-earth space.)

In other news many new comet pictures arriving show 46P/Wirtanen and its tail (even better here), the erupting 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1 and Chen-Gao. And here is the lunar crescent of right now.

1 comment:

Daniel Fischer said...

A far better picture of Saturday's slender crescent!