New Horizons Flyby of Ultima Thule - Countdown and Simulation Live Stream

[link to www.youtube.com (secure)]
In about 12 hours, NASA's New Horizons probe will make its closest encounter with Ultima Thule, a distant Kuiper Belt object. New Horizons will fly by Ultima Thule at a distance of about 3500 km, at a speed of about 14 km/s. It's such a fast encounter, that even 12 hours before closest approach the probe is still over 1.5 times farther from Ultima Thule than the moon is from the earth. I'll be live streaming a simulation of the close approach at the above link, showing how Ultima Thule is still just a faint star to the probe but by midnight tonight it will grow into a detectable shape. Based on occultation observations of Ultima Thule passing in front of background stars seen from earth, it is thought to have a binary shape, with two lobes stuck together.
[link to en.wikipedia.org (secure)]
Tonight New Horizons will fly by the object, and afterwards it will begin transmitting those images back to earth. As with its earlier flyby of Pluto, the image download times will likely be quite long due to the extreme distance and low bitrate of the transmission.