October 31, 2015 • asteroid • interesting objects • news

In the video above you can see the movement of asteroid TB145 that swung by earth very early in the morning on October 31st 2015. Various sources stated that you would need at least an 8"-10" telescope and nice skies to see this object moving, but the Revolution Imager put this event in the hands of those with much smaller, modest telescopes in the worst of skies.

This video is roughly 10x faster than it was actually moving, but you can see it moving in the bottom left. 400 meters wide 310,000 miles away - travelling at a mere 78,000 miles/h



The telescope used was a very modest one, an Explore Scientific 102mm/4" achromat refractor mounted on a Celestron AVX mount. The mount was connected to a laptop using a USB serial cable and the free, open-source planetarium software "Stellarium" was used to guide the telescope to the asteroid and track it as it moved. The images were captured to a computer using an EasyCap frame-grabber and free SharpCap software. An Baader UHC-S light-pollution filter was also used to keep the sky-glow from a 70% moon and a nasty streetlamp that was in the direction of the asteroid.

To give you an idea just how nasty the street lamp, moon, humidity and the skies are, this is what the neighborhood looks like:

The Revolution Imager was configured as follows: