Those of you who hunt fainter satellites with telescopes may be interested in this upcoming passage of a satellite of the Sun. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- FLYBY OF 2002 NY40 Roger W. Sinnott Senior Editor Sky & Telescope On Saturday night, August 17-18, observers in Europe, Africa, and the Americas are very well positioned to observe the flyby of 2002 NY40, a recently discovered near-Earth asteroid. During that night alone it passes through five constellations, beginning in Sagitta and ending up in Hercules. As mentioned in an earlier AstroAlert, this 0.5-km object passes only a little outside the Moon's orbit. It is expected to become as bright as 9th magnitude in the hours leading up to closest approach, which occurs near 7:47 Universal Time on August 18th. Observers with small telescopes and even binoculars should be able to witness this rare event. Using a magnification of 50x or more, skywatchers should have no trouble perceiving the object's motion as it glides by background stars in the field of view. It will be moving at up to 8 arcminutes per minute of time! Sky & Telescope has prepared four detailed finder charts for 2002 NY40, showing its path across a 60-degree arc of sky that night. These charts are PDFs, meaning they can be viewed or printed on a computer that has Acrobat Reader (free downloadable software). For links to the charts, see our updated article on the flyby at: http://skyandtelescope.com/observing/objects/asteroids/article_697_1.asp The links to the charts are on page 2. Instead of a single track, the charts show individual tracks as seen from five different cities: London, Johannesburg, Boston, Buenos Aires, and Los Angeles. The idea is that you can estimate the asteroid's track for your own location using these cities for reference. The magnitude limit for stars is 8.6. These charts were prepared with the help of the Minor Planet Center's Ephemeris Service ( http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/mpc.html ), a valuable resource in any close encounter of this type. After printing out one of our charts, you must orient it to match the field of view of your telescope. To simplify this process, Lawrence Garrett (Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers) has devised a clever observing aid that can be built from simple hardware items ( http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~rhill/alpo/minplan/easy/easyview.html ). Good luck observing this rather unusual event! Roger W. Sinnott Senior Editor Sky & Telescope --------------------------------------------------------------------- Send listserv messages to: astro-l@listserv.uww.edu Send listserv requests to: astro-l-request@listserv.uww.edu --------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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