2017-10-01

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AlphaPhoenix

3122 Florence is a Near Earth Object (NEO) being tracked by the Minor Planets Center. It's a 2.5 mile wide chunk of rock , not expected to hit Earth anytime soon, but it's certainly nearby! My dad participates in the MPC's citizen science program, and took a video of 3122 Florence as it flew past Earth a few weeks ago. It passed within about 4.9 million miles, or about 20x the Earth-moon distance. It was moving so fast across the sky you could literally watch it move over the course of a few minutes. The timelapse shown at the end of this video takes place over less than 15 minutes. It's pretty amazing to me that with a shed full of optics, we can perceive pretty tiny chunks of cold rock flying through space millions of miles away!

More about radio astronomy of asteroids:

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2011/3248.html

Music and stuff used:

I Dunno by grapes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)

http://ccmixter.org/files/grapes/16626

3122 Florence radio imaging: Arecibo Observatory