Near-Earth Asteroid 2024 RQ close encounter: an image – 15 Sept. 2024
This image of the near-Earth asteroid 2024 RQ was taken during our live feed, with the object still traveling to reach the minimum distance from us of 524.000 km, about 1,4 times the average lunar distance.
The image above comes from a single 60-second exposure, remotely taken with the Celestron C14+Paramount ME+SBIG ST8-XME robotic unit available as part of the Virtual Telescope Project. The telescope tracked the apparent motion of the asteroid, so it looks like a sharp dot of light, indicated with a white arrow, while stars leave bright streaks on the background.
An extremely bright Moon was in the same spot of the sky.
At the imaging time, asteroid 2024 RQ was at about 630.000 km from us, on its way to its fly-by with the Earth.
This 25 – 57 m large asteroid will reach its minimum distance (about 524.000 km from the center of the Earth, 1.4 times the average lunar distance) from us on 16 Sept. 2024, at 10:35 UTC (source: Nasa/JPL). Of course, there are no risks at all for our planet.
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