Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Asteroid came very close this morning

It approached Earth's center to within 133,000 km (0.000888 AU) at 7 hours UTC this morning: asteroid 2008 CT1 had been discovered only shortly before the encounter when it should have brightened to about 15 mag. and has since faded to below 20th. Another close shave, but nowhere near the record holders for closest approaches to Earth. With an absolute brightness of 27.7 CT1 is only about 10 meters in diameter, so if had been on a collision course with Earth it would have burned up in the atmosphere as a nice fireball.

In other news another fine picture of yesterday's Venus/Jupiter/Moon trio has turned up (this morning the Moon was long 'past' Venus as a view from Oz shows) as have nice views of the ISS that have also made it into SpaceWeather. And visual estimates of comet Chen-Gao hovered around 12.8 mag. last night and 13.5 mag. the night before.

1 comment:

Daniel Fischer said...

After the asteroid was long gone, it inspired AstroProf to ponder these kinds of objects.