Near-Earth Asteroid 2019 SL7 very close encounter: an image (8 Oct. 2019)
On 9 Oct. 2019, the near-Earth asteroid 2019 SL7 has a safe, close encounter with our planet, coming at about 540.000 km from us, a bit further than the Moon. We captured it!
Near-Earth Asteroid 2019 SL7: 7 Oct. 2019
The image above comes from a single, 300-seconds exposure, remotely taken with “Elena” (PlaneWave 17″+Paramount ME+SBIG STL-6303E) robotic unit available at Virtual Telescope. The telescope tracked the apparent motion of the asteroid, this is why stars show as small trails, while the asteroid looks like a sharp dot of light in the center of the image, marked by an arrow.
At the imaging time, asteroid 2019 SL7 was at about 2.5 millions of km from the Earth and it was on its way approaching us.
This 13-40 meter large asteroid will reach its minimum distance (540.000 km) from us on 9 Oct. 2019, at 14:28 UTC, that is one hour later after this post was published. Of course, there are no risks at all for our planet.
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