Big news last week as mainstream media was reporting on an asteroid having a very close encounter with earth at a distance of 290k kilometers. To put this into perspective, the moon is about 385k kilometers away. 

The news that this asteroid was only discovered on the 16th of June makes it even more interesting as it shows how unprepared we would be for an extinction level event asteroid. 

Anyway, this close distance meant that it’s possible for us, amateurs, to track and image this object. This is usually very easy, we have a bunch of software at our disposal to steer our telescopes to the desired object and start imaging. Astronomy is basically point and click today. But not for recently discovered objects. This meant looking up the NASA coordinates and manually directing our GOTO systems to the asteroid. 

On Saturday evening I joined the amazing Dobsonian Power Youtube livestream to join the channel’s Explorer Quest, where amateur astronomers who are members of the community can join the stream and cast their telescope views. Our mission was to capture this asteroid and we can proudly say this mission was accomplished. Cheers to Tiago Ferreira and his amazing Youtube channel!

Here is asteroid 2024MK flying past us at a close distance with the Pegasus constellation in the background.