This weekend, I acheived a long standing ambition.  To measure the distance to one of the universe' most strange and distant objects. Quasars are the super-luminous cores of very distant galaxies which are thought to surround a super-massive black hole.  Rather than give a dissertation on the nature of quasars, here is a link describing quasars generally and a specific link to 3C-273.  If you need to go and have a read and then come back to this page.

(Click on the image for full sized animation)

At approximately 4pm on the afternoon of January 27th 2012.  A small asteroid named 2012 BX34 will pass just 44,000miles from Earth. 2012 BX34 was only discovered on January 25th by the Catalina Sky Survey in the US.  The asteroid is about 8m wide (about the size of a bus).  It is rare for an asteroid to pass so close to Earth.  Consider that the Moon is about 250,000 miles from us so this asteroid passes less than 1/5th of the distance to the Moon and only twice as far as geosynchronous satellites!  The image sequence above was taken from Raheny Observatory, Dublin, Ireland (MPC #J41) just before midnight (going into) January 26th.  Each frame is a stack of 5 x 3 second images.  The images are aligned with the motion of the asteroid so the asteroid is presented as a point.  This is why the stars appear to be dotted lines.  The asteroid very quickly moves into the southern sky and therefore this is the only opportunity I will get to image this asteroid this year.  The asteroid is approx. 24,000 times fainter than you could expect to see with the naked eye.  Its travelling along close to 9km/sec.