Approaching Asteroid Florence (3122) is 5.8 Million Miles from Earth

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Photographer
Mike Olason
Email
moicylander@centurylink.net
Location of photo
Denver Colorado
Date/Time of photo
27 August 2017, 0813UT
Equipment
11" SCT f/6.4 and STF-8300M CCD Camera
Description
Asteroid Florence (3122) is 5.8 Million Miles from Earth when these images were taken. It will makes it's close approach to Earth on September 1 when it will be 4.4 Million Miles from Earth at about magnitude 9 moving at about 1/2 degree per hour across Earth's night skies. The asteroid is about 2.7 miles wide. This image is an average of twenty 15 second images that were taken 2.8 minutes apart. The asteroid was moving at 13.9'/Hour and in this image the asteroid moved 12.2' (0.2 degrees) in 53 minutes. The image shows the time and position of the asteroid when the first image was taken and the time and position of the asteroid when the last image was taken. The asteroid moved from upper left to lower right in this sequence of images.
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CATEGORIES
Astronomy Pictures: Sky & Telescope's Online Gallery, Meteor, Comet & Asteroid Pictures
Mike Olason

About Mike Olason

I started imaging comets in 1994 with an ST-5 CCD Camera and an 11" SC Telescope. Since then the CCD cameras have changed (ST-7, ST-402ME and STF-8300M), but I am still using the 11" SC Telescope. Naturally I have used a lot of smaller telescopes to obtain larger fields of view. I live south of Denver at an elevation of 6150 feet which allows me to image comets down to almost magnitude 21 on a perfect night. Unfortunately ChemTrails have turned Denver cloudy and dry. I use the camera software CCDOps to process my images. All I do to each image is dark subtraction and flat field, stack images as required to show faint comets, contrast/bright adjust the final image and maybe use a median filter to reduce the image noise. The result is an image that reflects reality and will never win any picture of the day award. If you would like to use my images for a project or ask a question send me an email to "moicylander@centurylink.net".
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