Your guide to the asteroid encounter

[bananas]

The asteroid will be closest around 6:28pm ET (9:28pm PT) today (Tuesday).

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/07/8688912-your-guide-to-the-asteroid-encounter

Your guide to the asteroid encounter
By Alan Boyle

The asteroid 2005 YU55 will pose no threat to Earth when it zooms by on Tuesday, but it will spark a frenzy of picture-taking and online chatting. So where do you find the good stuff?

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Watching it pass by

You won't be able to see YU55 zoom by with your naked eye. Even at its closest approach, the asteroid will be no brighter than magnitude 11 — much dimmer than the magnitude-6.5 threshold for naked-eye observations. Astronomers say you'd need something on the order of a 6-inch telescope, and you'd have to know exactly where to look.

Sky & Telescope's editors have offered viewing advice as well as charts that show YU55's progress through the constellations. If you have your telescope aimed in the right place, you should be able to see a starlike point moving from west to east. "It will be gliding fast enough to move along in real time as you watch using a moderately high-magnification eyepiece," Sky & Telescope says.

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Watching it on the Web

NASA is offering two main portals to asteroid imagery: Asteroid and Comet Watch on the main NASA site, and Asteroid Watch on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's website. Both those sites should feature the latest and greatest images available to the space agency, and you should be able to see movies of YU55's encounter by late Tuesday or Wednesday.

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[MineralMan]

1. Here are links to those two sites:

Nasa's Asteroid and Comet Watch: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/asteroids/main/index.html

JPL Asteroid Watch: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroidwatch/

Just in case someone actually wants to go there. It's a non-event, though. If it were not for science, we wouldn't even know that asteroid was passing.

[bananas]

2. Thanks, there are more links in the article to other sites. nt