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The 40-90 metre diameter asteroid 2023 DZ2 will fly-by the Earth this weekend. After passing the Moon at 515,000km it will pass the Earth at a distance of some 68,000km. Time of closest Earth approach will be 19:49 UT on Saturday evening.
Impressive. Thank you for posting Bill!
Is there any observation program from the Asteroids & Remote Planets Section?Regards from Germany,
AntonelloLocation: Eching, Bavaria, Germany.
Interests: Moon, planets, deep sky, comets, minor planets, astrophotography, archeoastonomy.
Bio: Italian amateur astronomer, living in Eching, Bavaria, Germany.
Observing sites: Bortle 3 (Bavarian Alps) and Bortle 5 (Eching, Bavaria, Germany).
Telescope: Celestron AVX C9.25
Binoculars: APM 40x110 ED | Ibis 20x80 ED | Nikon Aculon 10x50Yes, this NEO is very well placed for us to follow this weekend. The original orbit had a very close approach tomorrow but the latest orbit on Horizons gives a miss distance of 176,000km tomorrow night. Tonight it is around 640,000 km away and around mag 14.
https://britastro.org/observations/observation.php?id=20230324_205728_032144a771899a47
I’ve just watched the BBC1 lunchtime news about this flyby. Under the name of each astronomer interviewed about this NEO, the BBC gave them the title ‘Astrologer’.
Argh! 🙂
Alex.
I just took a snapshot of this object via itel Siding Spring.
https://britastro.org/observations/observation.php?id=20230325_132331_3b8534ca4a00aed8
I’ve just watched the BBC1 lunchtime news about this flyby. Under the name of each astronomer interviewed about this NEO, the BBC gave them the title ‘Astrologer’.
Argh!
Alex.
Reclaim the night!
With a concerted effort in the public media, astronomers could call themselves astrologers and hoi polloi would begin to think of astrologers as scientist rather than mystics, entertainers and/or charlatans.
Vocabulary has changed radically in the past. Consider the terms “nice”, “gay” and “hacker”.
Might be difficult though …
Peter Pravec derived a rotation period of 0.105hr (6.3 minutes). I had pretty rubbish conditions last night but this is a lightcurve folded onto that period for two runs separated by 12 minutes. It fits quite well.
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I’ve been looking into this event, and, for the record, there seems to be an error in Bill Barton’s original post.
On 24 March the figures that were being given by news outlets for this close approach were that the asteroid would pass the Moon at 515,000km and Earth at 168,000km (not 68,000km). In fact this prediction was quite accurate, the miss distance being 175,000km. The object was measured at 70m diameter.
The BBC news article Bill linked to was revised on 25 March, but see, for example, the Guardian article:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/mar/24/city-killer-asteroid-to-pass-harmlessly-between-earth-and-moonThe initial orbit of 2023 DZ2 was quite uncertain and the close approach distance was uncertain too. At one point the probability of impact at the next close approach (2026-03-27) was 1 in 670. This got the media interested. By March 17 the most likely miss distance this time around was 180,000 km. This gradually got revised and some old observations were found dating back to January so by March 20 we knew that the minimum geocentric distance was going to be near 175,000 km.
Far from being a possible impact in 2026 the miss distance will actually be around a million km. This shows how chaotic gravitational perturbations are for close approaches where a small inbound trajectory error can lead to a much larger outbound one.
On Alex and Paul’s point, I think it is quite understandable that so many people get the terms astrology/astrologer and astronomy/astronomer confused. Other scientific disciplines have the ‘ology’ suffix – think of geology, meteorology, physiology, biology etc. ‘Astronomy’ is a peculiarity, linguistically. It means, literally, the naming of the stars. It would be more logical for the science of the stars to be called astrology.
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