On 17 August, 2002, Roi Alonso Sobrino , a STARE collaborator and our site operator in Tenerife, took advantage of some telescope down-time (the dec motor was not working) to record part of the passage of asteroid 2002NY40 near the Earth. The RA motor still worked, so the telescope was able to track the sky reasonably. Roi chose an exposure time of 7 sec. with the V (visual) filter in place. The trail of the asteroid appears dashed because of the relatively long CCD readout time of 13 sec, during which the shutter remains closed.

We will post more pertinent info about these observations, such as field coordinates and UTC times, when it becomes available.

The following is a composite image, 4 degrees long, of approximately one hour of the asteroid's motion. The separate frames were used to create the MPEG movie, astny40_mov1.mpeg, accessible below.

Roi also made MPEG movies showing the asteroid moving through the STARE field-of-view from upper-left to lower-right. Click on the thumbnail image to display a full-sized representation of the first frame of the respective MPEG (and a link to that MPEG). On it is superposed an arrow pointing to the asteroid's starting position and a line showing its motion through the movie. With this aid, it is easier to spot the faint asteroid in the somewhat-flickering movie. Again, the times and coordinates of these movies will be added when the information becomes available.

Movie 1

Movie 2

Movie 3