Near-Earth Asteroid 2019 UC close encounter: an image (26 Oct. 2019)
On 29 Oct. 2019, the near-Earth asteroid 2019 UC will have a safe, close encounter with our planet, coming at about 1.1 millions of km from us, 2.9 times the average distance the Moon. Here it is an image we grabbed a couple of nights ago.
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 faint, sharp dot of light in the center of the image, marked by an arrow.
At the imaging time, asteroid 2019 UC was at about 1.9 millions of km from the Earth and it was on its way approaching us.
This 39-88 meters large asteroid will reach its minimum distance (1.1 millions of km) from us on 29 Oct. 2019, at 01:29 UTC. Of course, there are no risks at all for our planet.
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