2014 JO25, Imatra

Asteroid 2014 JO25 is one of the potentially threatening asteroids on Earth, and after talking to Laihi Kari, I decided to try to describe this object that is quickly cooled in the sky. I got into filming at the turn of the 19.4 day when the asteroid had risen high enough above the tower roof. The object was found surprisingly well based on the coordinates given by the stellarium and I took 17 30s of exposures from this which I made a GIF animation for. Determining the brightness from this is tricky because the asteroid moves quickly relative to the background and with exposures above 1s clearly stretches into a streak. The brightness was estimated to be in the 14mag range.

In recent studies with the Arecibo radio telescope, the asteroid was found to be a double asteroid, i.e., an association of two large crumbs. The particles are 640 and 670m in size, with a total length of 1.3km. This is definitely worth trying to detect, the subject is at its best on the night between 19-20.4, when the brightness should rise close to 10mag, and this makes even the camera optics of the wicked cell.

This description has been automatically translated from Finnish. Click here to see the original text.

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2014 JO25 - 19.4.2017 at 00.00 Imatra Observation number 63293