Near Earth Asteroid 2002 NY40 Video

The above map shows location of asteroid 2002 NY40 during 6h windows on the mornings of August 17 - 19, 2002. This object disappeared into Sun's glare a day after the closest approach . Think what chances we would have if it was coming the other way on a collision trajectory...

The animation on the left covers 1 hour and it is composed of 120 images (15 sec. exposure each, 15 sec. apart) taken from Harrowsmith, Ontario on August 17, 2002 between 5:36:22 UT and 6:36:08 UT (start of the first to the end of the last exposure) with Cookbook 245 CCD camera (used in full resolution, 15-bit mode) through Celestron Ultima 8 SCT (at f3.0) and IR-blocking filter. At that time 10.4 mag. asteroid was in Delphinus - it "almost" occulted 9.5 mag. star SAO12630.

The animation on the right covers about 5 minutes and it is composed of 12 images (15 sec. exposure each, 15 sec. apart) taken from Harrowsmith, Ontario on August 18, 2002 between 6:03:23 UT and 6:08:05 UT (start of the first to the end of the last exposure) . The field of view is identical ! 2002 NY40 already crossed from Lyra to Hercules and was moving about twelve times faster than a day before.

Both frames are 36 arcmin. wide. North is up. Frame rate 1 / 50msec. (600x).

Follow the this link to see the movement of 2002 NY40 among stars of Hercules during 40 minutes around the time of the closest approach to Earth. In that movie, NEA is kept at the center of the frame while stars shift in the background!

Using AIP4WIN, each frame was calibrated, resampled to square pixels, gammalog-scaled, edges were slightly cropped and images were finally resampled to 50% of the original size. AVI file was created in Corel PhotoPaint 8 and it was 50% compressed to reduce download size (for example from 11.8MB to 1.5MB for the left video above).

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© Jan Wisniewski