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.
J. M. Silverman, A. V. Filippenko, S. B. Cenko (UC Berkeley) report on behalf of a larger collaboration (PTF) via The Astronomer's Telegram 3398 the discovery of a new supernova in Messier 51. This object was independently discovered first by A. Riou and reported as PSN J13303600+4706330. PTF discoveries are made by autonomous PTF software, as well as by the Galaxy Zoo Supernova Project (Smith et al. 2011, MNRAS, 412, 1309)
On June 3rd 2011 the following image was taken at Raheny Observatory, Dublin showing clearly the supernova event. The measured magnitude is 14.9 making this one of the brightest supernovae visible in while.
Click on image above for full res image.
Following on from this image I attempted to take a low resolution spectra of this event using a star analyser grating and wedge prism mounted in the optical path. I had some success. The supernova is clearly recorded and bright emission around the h-alpha profile highlights the p-cygni profile which was noted in the discovery notice.
