Close Approach of Near Earth Asteroid 2012 LZ1, 14-15 June 2

[starfinder]

A large approx. 500m+ near Earth asteroid, designated as 2012 LZ1, was just discovered on Sun 10th June.

It will make its closest approach, at about 13 lunar distances, tomorrow morning (Fri) at around 7am Singapore time. Would be in the constellation Aquila, somewhere between the star Altair and the Sagittarius Teapot asterism I think.

At an estimated mag 14, it won't be visible in most amateur telescopes, even at dark sky locations. However, perhaps we may be able to image it, even from Singapore. I may give it a try tonite.

See:
http://www.itelescope.net/sky-alerts/20 ... -15-j.html

http://www.space.com/16131-huge-asteroi ... bcast.html

The asteroid's orbital elements and ephemeris (celestial coordinates) may be found here:
http://scully.cfa.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/r ... &o=K12L01Z


If anyone manages to image it from Singapore, pls post it here!

[starfinder]

I think I managed to image near-Earth asteroid 2012 LZ1 last night, at around 12:15am Singapore time on 15 June 2012.

The instrument used was a 0.2m optical telescope (a.k.a. Meade LX-90 8" SCT at f/10), and a Canon EOS 60D dSLR. The exposures were typically at ISO1600 and 15s.

Here are 5 cropped images taken a few minutes apart. The original frames were centred on where the asteroid was supposed to be. An object can clearly be seen as having moved between the 5 frames.

I have other frames apart from these. I did a rough calculation of the rate of movement of the object based on an examination of these frames and the times they were taken. The result was around 45 arc seconds per minute, which is very close to the 38 arc seconds per minute shown on the website of the Minor Planet Center. So it seems to confirm that this is indeed asteroid 2012 LZ1!

The predicted magnitude was at mag 13.9. So I think it's not too bad to be able to image it from the centre of Singapore using amateur equipment.


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[Mariner]

Kudos to you for being able to find such a faint object AND image it at the same time.

[Gary]

Good hunting Gavin! Not too bad is an understatement! Congrats!

[weixing]

Hi,
Well done...

By the way, did your GOTO scope able to track the asteroid or you just point at that location and shoot?

Have a nice day.

[starfinder]

Thanks all for the comments.

I took dozens of images over the course of 2-3 hrs (whilst at the same time watching the Italy v Croatia group match).

To locate the object, I mostly relied on the precise ephemeris (celestial coordinates) which I had generated for 10 min intervals using the Minor Planet Center's webpage for this:
http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/MPEph/MPEph.html

I then keyed in the coordinates into the Autostar hanbox every other 10-20 mins.