Potentially Hazardous Asteroid 2015 TB145: a stunning video sequence (30/31 Oct. 2015)
Potentially Hazardous Asteroid 2015 TB145: an image (30 Oct. 2015)
At Virtual Telescope, we did a great work tracking the “Halloween”, potentially hazardous asteroid 2015 TB145 while approaching us late last Oct. We obtained an early image and planned a live, online event, which turned out to be a huge international success. More than 15.000 individuals from many different Countries joined the live feed enjoying this interesting asteroid, which could be a dead comet, assuming its orbit and radar data.
The image above comes from the event night and it was already presented to our visitors. Now, we are very proud to share with you an exceptional movie, coming from all the images we grabbed during our life feed.
A total of 276 frames taken back to back and covering 2h and 45 minutes. To our knowledge, no one did something similar with this target. Considering that 165 minutes of coverage are compressed in almost 14 seconds, the motion of the asteroid in the video is accelerated by a factor of 700x. Click on the movie below top get a full resolution version (42 Mb)!.
Potentially Hazardous Asteroid 2015TB145, a video: click on it for HiRes version
Images were remotely taken with the PlaneWave 17″+Paramount ME+SBIG STL-6303E robotic unit part of the Virtual Telescope. The telescope tracked the apparent motion of the asteroid, which is visible as a sharp dot of light in the center, while stars are trailing on the background. Looking at the video, it is evident how, while it moves in the sky, the Moon glare interfered more and more with the vision.
Below is the podcast from our live feed
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This was fun to watch. I made a similar time-lapse animation with an almost identical setup, but a few hours later, and ~6500 km to the west, in Vermont (www.nkaf.org) My animation has only 99 images (from over 300), and can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqSlAkTWpzA