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link to www.youtube.com (secure)]
As promised, here's the link to the webcast for tonight, which will start at midnight eastern time (4:00 UT) provided the weather allows. Clear sky clock is showing a clear forecast for tonight.
Asteroid 2015 TB145 has a peculiar elliptical and inclined orbit which has caused some to speculate as to whether it's the dormant husk of a comet which has run out of volatile ices. Even if so, any meteoroids from this object's history are still expected to miss earth by about 100,000 km. If they do hit us and cause a meteor shower, the shower's radiant would be in the constellation Eridanus and it would be best seen from Asia.
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link to www.seti.org]
Here are some charts of the asteroid's location from various locations throughout the US. All times shown are local times. Here's a view with Starry Night Pro showing the path the asteroid will take as seen from Denver, Colorado:
Here is Miami, Florida:
And here is Los Angeles, California:
Reality420 also provided the following directions for anyone who wants to load the asteroid's orbit into Stellarium to create more precise charts, with the caveat that Stellarium will not calculate the perturbation of the orbit over time due to earth's gravity.
Dr. Astro,
Hope the show goes well on Saturday morning.
For those who use Stellarium and don't know how to import the asteroid's elements or who are using an ancient version (like me) here's the data and how to get it to work:
[2015 TB145]
name = TB145
parent = Sun
radius = 50
oblateness = 0.0
albedo = 0.99
lighting = true
orbit_visualization_period = 200.0
halo = true
color = 1.0,1.0,1.0
tex_halo = star16x16.png
tex_map = deimos.png
coord_func = comet_orbit
# Orbit els for 2015-Oct-31 16:30
# sourced Oct 30 2015
# orbit_Epoch = 2457327.187500000
orbit_TimeAtPericenter = 2457368.115112533793
orbit_PericenterDistance = 0.2940799451166227
orbit_Eccentricity = 0.8606976945877151
orbit_ArgOfPericenter = 121.6120425580749
orbit_AscendingNode = 37.73243512693168
orbit_Inclination = 39.71196288935560
For Windows -
- Go to the Stellarium program folder
- Go to the data subfolder
- In there you will find a file named: ssystem.ini
(You can just search for the file - ssystem.ini and copy/modify the search result)
- Make a copy of ssystem.ini and put it in a safe place in your MyDocuments folder in case something goes wrong.
- Open ssystem.ini in the subfolder with notepad or any text editor
- Go to the bottom of the list of entries in the ssystem.ini file
- Skip a line and Copy/paste the above bolded entry at the bottom.
- Save the modified ssystem.ini file in its original location.
Start Stellarium
Advance the date/time to around Oct 31 1:00AM local time
Tap F3 to bring up the Stellarium Search
Enter tb145 (it should show as a possibility)
Hit enter to center the asteroid.
You can now click through/play with the times to see about where it will be at the displayed time.
Note that it hangs out just north of Orion's shield for most of Dr. Astro's viewing time which will probably end ~6:00AM EDT.
I chose the epoch as Oct 31 @16:30UT which is near the point of greatest perturbation and also within hours of the viewing session Dr. Astro has planned.
As far as I know Stellarium does not perturb the orbit so the position will become more in error the further you get from 16:30UT either way but for a one-shot, very close is good enough, it will be ok.
When the event is done, merely reopen the ssystem.ini file and delete the text for the asteroid you just entered and resave to restore Stellarium to the original config.
Have fun.
R420
Quoting: Reality420 Tonight I will be tracking the asteroid directly using a new program I wrote to provide continuous tracking of near earth asteroids just like this one. It uses ephemeris files generated from FindOrb, which does account for the gravity of earth, the moon, and the planets, and it converts it to a series of continuous slewing commands and sends it to the telescope. The program is currently in a prototype version, but the final version will be universally compatible with all ASCOM compatible telescopes. More information about the software will be available in the near future.
