Near-Earth asteroid 2013 YL2: an amazing image and movie (01 Jan. 2013)
Near-Earth asteroid 2013 YL2: 01 Jan. 2014
Just minutes before the for the live, online event scheduled to cover its close approach, the near-Earth asteroid 2013 YL2 was imaged at Virtual Telescope while it was approaching us.
Above is an image remotely taken with the PlaneWave 17″ robotic unit part of the Virtual Telescope. It comes from the average of 4, 60-seconds exposures: the robotic system was tracking the fast apparent motion of the minor planet, at the imaging time located at 1.6 millions of km from the Earth.
Below is a video made from about 60 images grabbed back to back, each with an integration of 20 seconds, with the telescope still tracking the fast mover. Please leave it a minute or so to properly download and display.
Near-Earth asteroid 2013 YL2: a movie (01 Jan. 2014)
Finally, the podcast of our live feed of the asteroid is available below:
Once again, the image speaks by itself: the robotic system did a great job tracking this difficult target and sharing it live with many people, online.
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