Someone Get Steven Tyler, An Asteroid Is Coming!
June 14, 2012 9:11 PM Get your seats ready for Almost-Armageddon, as a cosmic rollercoaster, an asteroid the size of a city block, is set to fly by us Earth beings tonight(June 14), and you may be able to watch it WITH YOUR OWN EYES.
2012 LZ1 just popped onto astronomers’ radar this week. It was discovered on the night of June 10-11 by Rob McNaught, who wAs staring through the Uppsala Schmidt telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia.The near-Earth asteroid 2012 LZ1, which astronomers think is about 1,650 feet (500 meters) wide, will come within 14 lunar distances of Earth Thursday evening, and the huge space rock may come close enough to be caught on camera.Researchers estimate that the space rock is between 1,000 and 2,300 feet wide (300-700 m).
You can watch the asteroid flyby on Slooh’s website, found here: http://events.slooh.com/ That’s what the team running the Slooh Space Camera thinks, anyway. The online skywatching service will train a telescope on the Canary Islands on 2012 LZ1 and stream the footage live, beginning at 8:00 p.m. EDT Thursday (0000 GMT Friday).
On Thursday evening, it will come within about 3.35 million miles (5.4 million kilometers) of our planet, or roughly 14 times the distance between Earth and the moon.
Leave a Comment