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Details:
This asteroid passed by Earth in space 1.5 million miles away and 15° away from the nearly Full Moon in the sky. At mag 10.1 it didn't exactly stand out in the bright sky near the Moon. Also, I was using Sky Safari 6 on my iPad to find it, and its position on the map was lagging behind its real position by 20-30 minutes. While a generally pleasant evening, there was a steady breeze with gusts, so I assume that's why the trail looks rather jerky, with Deep Sky Stacker outright ignoring 4 really wacko frames, hence the 4 gaps in the trail.
After shooting the timelapse sequence I converted the scope to visual use and searched for the asteroid with powers from 20x to 125x until I accidentally discovered it passing a pair of bright stars that weren't on the map. What? Examining the situation further, that's when I realized it was farther down its path than what was showing on my map. I even updated its orbital elements with no change. Its movement was just slow enough to require a couple minutes to be sure it had moved, but once found it was easily followed. The visual magnitude limit was around 11 while the camera reached to mag 15 in places.
It was mentioned on the front page that the last visit of a kilometer-class PHA to Earth was in 2022 from asteroid 1994 PC1. It came about twice as close.
Here's a link to that event.
Photo data:
Panasonic G9, Askar V 80, Sky-Watcher GTi
... 21 frames x (f/6.18, 30 sec, ISO 800), cadence = 30 seconds
... timelapse duration: 21 minutes
... N left W up, FOV = 1.98° x 1.49°
... stacked in DSS, processed in Paint Shop Pro 2023
... date: Jun 27, 2026 11:13pm-11:45pm MDT
Photographer's website:
No URL provided.
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