2004
XP14 close approach on July 03, 2006
Clear skies over Belgium on the evening of Jul 3rd,
2006, allowed me to observe the
close encounter of NEO 2004 XP14, an
Apollo asteroid. A few hours before, this asteroid,
with a diameter of 600 meter, passed only 400.000 km
from Earth, or about 1.1 times the distance to the
moon..
The image below was obtained by
stacking 51 CCD images of 3 sec exposure each.
Between successive images, a 5 second delay was
entered. The fast displacement of the asteroid is
very obvious. Instrument used was a 0.35-m f/6.3
telescope with an (unfiltered) SBIG ST-7XME CCD
camera, operating at CBA Belgium Observatory. Currently
there are no known physical properties of this NEO,
other than an estimate of its diameter.
2004 XP14 close approach on July
03, 2006
51 image frames with 3 sec integration
Start time : 21h57m08s UT