Potentially Hazardous Asteroid 2023 SP1 close encounter: image and movie – 3 Feb. 2024
We tracked again the potentially hazardous asteroid 2023 SP1 while it safely comes relatively close to us, capturing the nice image and time-lapse below.
Potentially Hazardous Asteroid 2023 SP1: 3 Feb. 2024.
The image above comes from a single 180-second exposure, remotely taken with the Celestron C14+Paramount ME+SBIG ST8-XME robotic unit available as part of the Virtual Telescope Project. The telescope perfectly tracked the asteroid, which looks like a sharp dot of light in the center, while stars leave bright streaks on the background.
At the imaging time, asteroid 2023 SP1 was at about 6.4 million of km from the Earth and it was slowly approaching us. The asteroid was discovered by the Panstarrs Survey on 17 Sept. 2023.
Using 106, short-exposure frames, we created the time-lapse below, covering 1365 seconds, that is 22 minutes and 45 seconds. The apparent speed seen in the video is 184 times faster than in reality.
Potentially Hazardous Asteroid 2023 SP1: time-lapse. 3 Feb. 2024.
This 190m – 430m large asteroid will reach its minimum distance (5.5 million of km, about 14 times the average lunar distance) from us on 7 Feb. 2024, at 00:06 UTC (source: Nasa/JPL). Of course, there are no risks at all for our planet.
We will show this fly-by, live here!
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