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That passage was very similar to this week’s, watching as the space rock silently crept across the starry background. I remember the thrill of seeing asteroid 4179 Toutatis on its close pass in 2004. At it’s brightest, 1994 PC1 should flirt with magnitude +9 or so, making it easily visible with a small telescope or perhaps, binoculars. That’s fast enough to see the motion of the speedy asteroid versus the starry background after watching it at the eyepiece for just a minute or two. At its closest on the night of January 18th at 21:51 Universal Time (UT), 1994 PC1 will be straddling on the Cetus/Pisces border and moving at a blistering 2 degrees an hour (spanning a section of sky four times the size of tonight’s Full Moon, per hour) or 2 arc minutes a minute. This week’s close approach gives observers a chance to see the asteroid for themselves. It’s orbital inclination of 33.5 degrees relative to the ecliptic makes it pass far from the Earth on most years.Ī closeup of Tueday’s flyby. The Apollo asteroid is an Earth-crosser, with a perihelion interior to our own at 0.9 Astronomical Units (AU) from the Sun, and an aphelion out in the asteroid belt at 1.8 AU, with an orbital period of 572 days. The asteroid was discovered on the night of August 9 th, 1994 by astronomer Robert McNaught observing from the Siding Spring Observatory. This is about five times the distance from the Earth to the Moon, and just a shade over the distance to the anti-sunward Earth-Sun Lagrange 2 point, soon to be the home of the James Webb Space Telescope.įortunately, both the Earth and said space telescope are safe from the asteroid on this pass, and will remain so for centuries in to the foreseeable future.
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We have such a chance coming right up on the evening of Tuesday, January 18 th, when 1.1-kilometer asteroid (7482) 1994 PC1 passes 1.23 million miles (1.98 million kilometers) from the Earth. In a slow moving universe, asteroids give us a rare chance to see things moving in real time. This week’s apparition of asteroid 1994 PC1 offers observers a chance to see a space rock moving in real time.