Near-Earth Asteroid 2018 DV1 very close encounter: image and podcast (02 Mar. 2018)
We observed the near-Earth asteroid 2018 DV1 while it reached its very close encounter and showed it to the world. It was a very successful event: if you missed it, here it is the podcast.
Near-Earth asteroid 2018 DV1: 02 Mar. 2018
The image above comes from a single, 10-seconds exposure, remotely taken with the 16″-f/3.75 Tenagra III (“Pearl”) robotic unit in Arizona, available as part of the partnership between the Virtual Telescope Project (Italy) and Tenagra Observatories (Arizona, USA).
The telescope tracked the very fast (780″/minute) apparent motion of the asteroid, this is why stars leave long trails, while the asteroid looks like a sharp dot of light in the center of the image, marked with two red lines. At the imaging time, asteroid 2018 DV1 was exactly at its minimum distance from us, about 105.000 km from the Earth’s surface. It is one of the closest encounters we recorded since the beginning of the year.
Below, you can find the podcast from our live streaming, which reached tens of thousands of people everywhere on the planet:
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