WAY OT, Again -- Haloween Near-earth Asteriod *LINK*
Brad Vietje
Well, astronomers now think it is actually a big, burned-out core of a comet. 2015 TB145 passed just over 300,000 miles from Earth yesterday (1.3X distance to moon), traveling some 78,000 MPH, so it's a good thing it missed!
I was able to photograph it late Friday night, and I created a few time-lapse animations that show the, um... comet, zipping past the stars in the background. The telescope is tracking the comet, so the stars appear as short streaks during each 30-sec exposure. One animation is 26 frames, the other is made from 99 frames.
Files are WAY too big to post here; you can see it on YouTube here:
Amazing clips! I hope you didn't track manually, that would be insane - I've done that for single exposures and it's backbreakingly tedious.
I'm really going to have to start following the news again, I didn't know that was coming. I used to check Sky&Telescope every few days. Of course, it was socked in here.
Just to put things into perspective, what kind of magnification/field of view are these?
Oh, BTW, we tried a little experiment at the beach last week. We were playing with some 5x night vision binoculars I have for the farm and I showed my son the Amdromeda galaxy - you could see it easily with the image intensification even though the seeing was too poor for naked eye. On a whim he took a photo through the ocular with his iPhone and got a usable photo!! Not beautiful but we were amazed! These night vision binocs are cheap gen1 (~$400) and have limited image quality but we were all surprised at how useful they are with the sky. At one point I was looking through them while my son was looking at the same object and I saw a meteor trail (what are the chances!) while he saw nothing.
Oh, if you haven't heard of this trick you might want to try it: when showing another person something through binoculars, especially a child, I look through one eyepiece with one eye and let him look through the other eyepiece. That way I can aim and he sees exactly what I am looking at!
Also I'm sure you know this, but someone else might not: a green laser pointer is hands down the best way to point out stars and planets to another person or group since the beam is extremely visible - due to perspective it looks like it is going all the way to the outer space! (Just be SURE there are no aircraft in the area...)
JKJ
Re: WAY OT, Again -- Haloween Near-earth Asteriod *LINK*
Thanks John! The telescope is a Planewave CDK-17 -- that's a 17" f/6.8, so if you think of it as a huge telephoto lens, it comes out to 2936mm f/6.8. These images are cropped to the central portion of the entire field of view, so in effect, like a 2x zoom, or ~ 6000mm.
Not mine, but I am very fortunate to work part-time at a very nice little observatory near my home (www.nkaf.org)
Safe spinning,
Brad Vietje
Newbury, VT
Re: WAY OT, Again -- Haloween Near-earth Asteriod *LINK*
