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