Asteroid 2015 TB145 Live Webcast - Thanks for Watching, Replay on Page 1

[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.
[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.


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.

Last Edited by Astromut on 10/31/2015 08:09 AM