Contains:  Solar system body or event
Asteroid 1994 PC1 - Animation (Takes a minute to load but worth it), Damien Cannane

Asteroid 1994 PC1 - Animation (Takes a minute to load but worth it)

Asteroid 1994 PC1 - Animation (Takes a minute to load but worth it), Damien Cannane

Asteroid 1994 PC1 - Animation (Takes a minute to load but worth it)

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Description

Mission accomplished! I was able to photograph asteroid 1994 PC1 last night for 1 hour and 22 minutes. At the time of my observation, the asteroid had already made its closest approach to Earth and was speeding away, in the sunward direction at close to 31,000 miles per hour. 405 photos were captured and they've been assembled into this 13-second video. The asteroid is moving from East to West (sunward in the early night sky), and starts in the upper left corner and proceeds through the center and out the bottom right of the cameras field of view at the end.
Other than artificial satellites (which we see a few during this video), I have never observed something moving so quickly against the background stars. This is because of how close the asteroid was at the time, just 1,600,000 miles! It moved the equivalent of ~3 full moon diameters in our sky in just 82 minutes!

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