by Tom McMahon
Last Saturday's fun observing Asteroid 2002NY40
On Aug. 17-18 a group of SVAS members got together at Blue Canyon for a night with the space rock. This was the closest encounter with an asteroid in 50 years. At its closest it was 1.4 moon distances away.
In preparation for the night's observations, I downloaded the ephemeris from JPL for 15-minute intervals from Aug. 17 @ 20:00 to Aug. 18 @2:30 using BC coordinates and altitude. They turned out to be very accurate. At 22:30 I pointed my Astrophysics 600 GOTO mount to the RA and DEC supplied by JPL and within seconds I had spotted the asteroid moving quickly through the half-degree field of my C8 telescope.
Each time the asteroid moved to the edge of the field, I adjusted my scope and thus began a chase of the space rock for about three hours. This gave Phil Mattingly, Vic Maris and Dave Kenyon a chance to look through my Telrad to eyeball the approximate position. After a number looks through my Telrad and a run back to their scopes all had found the space rock in their own scopes. Dave then imaged the space rock.