Asteroid Encounters

This year I have observed more asteroids than ever before with 29 detected so far. Some them have been as a part of the Unistellar Citizen Science campaigns, but most of them have just been for fun. For instance, earlier this week I looked at the asteroid 626 Notburga which was in the constellation of Cassiopeia.

The image above is an animated gif of two images taken 75 minutes apart showing Notburga's motion though the sky. The individual exposures were short so it wasn't easy spot the nebula that was nearby it in the sky. So in between these two images I took a longer one to try to bring out a part of the Heart Nebula.
 

Here the asteroid appears as a line and there's some hint of the red hydrogen gas of the Heart Nebula across much of the upper right portion of the image. 

Since asteroids look like moving dots or streaks it is sometimes more interesting to catch them when they are near some other astronomical object in the sky. A great resource to find out when as asteroid will be near a bright star, a deep sky object or even another asteroid are the observing guides at MinorPlanet.info. I've used that to find all of the close encounters on this page.

Here are asteroids 712 Boliviana (top right) and 89 Julia (below center) from back in October:

Just this week asteroids 1 Ceres and 1140 Crimea have been passing the bright star Aldebaran.

Aldebaran is the bright star at center. Asteroid (and dwarf planet) 1 Ceres is the bright moving object to its lower right. Much fainter is 1140 Crimea. It is the faint moving dot in the upper left. At the time of the images Crimea was actually 25 million miles closer to Earth than Ceres. That doesn't help it much in brightness though because it is much smaller. 1146 Crimea is just 17 miles across while Ceres is 587 miles across!

In early October asteroid 27 Euterpe passed directly in front of one of my favorite globular star clusters: Messier 22. I caught the event on two nights as the asteroid was near the cluster, but it was cloudy the night it passed in front of it.

Euterpe is to the right of the cluster. At the time it was 21 light minutes from Earth, while the star cluster is some 10.600 light years away.

An even bigger disparity in distance was back in March when asteroid 70 Panopaea passed directly in front of spiral galaxy NGC 3344. 

That night asteroid 70 Panopaea was 17 light minutes from Earth while the spiral galaxy is more than 22 million light years from our Milky Way Galaxy.

In the coming weeks and month I will be looking for more interesting asteroid encounters and posting some of them here.