Near-Earth asteroid 2015 HD1 extremely close encounter: an amazing image and movie(20 Apr. 2015)
Near-Earth Asteroid 2015 HD1: 20 Apr. 2015
While the near-Earth asteroid 2015 HD1 was gettin closer and closer, Virtual telescope showed it live, online, to several thousands of curious people from all around the globe.
The image above is a single 180-seconds exposure, remotely taken with the PlaneWave 17 robotic unit part of the Virtual Telescope during the live, public feed. The robotic mount tracked the fast apparent motion of the asteroid, so stars are trailing, while the asteroid is perfectly tracked. At the imaging time, the asteroid was already at 400.000 km from us and approaching its min distance of about 75.000 km in a few more hours.
Using 80, 30-seconds exposures, taken from 21:49 to 22:4 UT, it was possible to make the movie below:
Asteroid 2015 HD1: 20 Apr. 2015
Below is the podcast from our live coverage of this close approach:
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Cool man