(I love obscure blog post titles that make sense and eventually are revealed to be puns.)
Early last year I announced that my friend Jeff Medkeff had named an asteroid after me (as well others named after PZ Myers, Rebecca Watson, and Michael Stackpole). 165347 philplait is a smallish rock about 1.3 kilometers across, just shy of a mile. It orbits the Sun in the main asteroid belt, on average — the orbit is a mild ellipse — about 350 million kilometers from the Sun.
At the time, I was thinking it would be fun to see if anyone could nab cool images of the rock. However, its size and distance make it very faint, so it was a bit of a difficult target. Worse, its position in the sky at that time put it too close to the Sun to see for long. So I basically put it on the back burner.
However, eventually the viewing geometry got better, and so few days ago amateur astronomer and BABloggee Rick Johnson decided to go for it. Despite clouds (and later, snow!) he was able to take several images of 165347 philplait, which he combined to make this totally cool movie:
Normally, Rick says, he can make animations like this for pretty faint objects, but the clouds made this one difficult. He had to do some post-processing to make it viewable; that’s why the stars look like round disks but the asteroid is just a couple of dots (normally, the asteroid would look the same size as the stars). Still, how cool is this? If he can do that under pretty poor observing conditions, what can be done when the weather is clear?
I looked up the asteroid’s orbit using the JPL Small Bodies Browser, and saw that 165347 philplait reaches opposition around March 15, in just a couple of weeks. That means it’s up all night, giving plenty of time to observe it, and it’s closest to Earth, making it as bright as possible.
So I’m giving a call out to any amateurs out there: I’d love to see more images and even animations of "my" asteroid! If you have the right equipment — a 12″ ’scope with a good CCD should be sufficient to get images of the 19th magnitude rock — then give it a shot. If you get good images (or animations) put them up on the Bad Astronomy/Universe Today forum, or Flickr, or wherever, and send me a link. I’ll collect them and post the images here, too. And if you can get images of the other asteroids that’s fine too, we can get PZ, Rebecca, and Stackpole in on the fun.
Happy rock hunting! And thanks!
March 1st, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Man!
Where is the love? You forgot about the ones named after me and Swoopy! I think ours were named before the others you mentioned!
March 1st, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Opposition on the Ides of March, you say? Tis a very ominious portent from the heavens!
March 1st, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Shoot, with the header I thought you were branching out into something cool but found that you had this named after you, forget cool, go for freaking cool.
March 1st, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Phil Plait: “165347 philplait is a smallish rock about 1.3 kilometers across, just shy of a mile.”
Almost as wide as your ego!
March 1st, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Do you get mineral rights for this sucker?
March 1st, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Hey, Phil! I’m not in the running, but how much is a cool image/animation of your namesake worth to you. I would have thought you can sweeten the pot a little by offering up a prize for the best one — a signed copy of your book at the very least. Don’t be a stingy fellow!!
March 1st, 2009 at 2:57 pm
@IVAN3MAN
I bet his head has a higher albedo.
March 1st, 2009 at 3:25 pm
So what you’re telling us is that philplait has been rickrolled.
March 1st, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Okay, so now you’re a ‘rock star’?
J/P=?
March 1st, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Hey Phil, I think this would be a good opportunity to help dispel one of the myths that everyone seems to always perpetuate, and that is the Asteroid Belt being cluttered with asteroids like they’re all just a few hundred yards apart. When ever it is depicted on TV, in artists conceptions, & such, you see tens or hundreds of them all in the same frame banging into each other like a scene from Star Wars.
Fact is, asteroids are about 300,000 miles apart on average…the distance between the earth & moon. Very low density in real terms yet few people know this. Also, from what I understand, NASA just sends spacecraft through the belt without much worry because the chance of an asteroid smacking into a spacecraft traveling through the region are very small. As a guy who likes to see things depicted as they are in reality, it bugs me to the core. Thanks.
Pax
March 1st, 2009 at 7:23 pm
The processing on the images makes it look a little artificial – but if you trust the photographer, I trust you. More importantly, please see if you can get mAnn Coulter to stop staring at me like that [shudder].
March 1st, 2009 at 8:46 pm
And you didn’t even have to pay “Rocky” to get a “star” named after you.
March 1st, 2009 at 11:12 pm
Phil Plait, I figured that you might like this:
Orbital Characteristics of 165347 Philplait
(Click on image for the link to the JPL/NASA interactive tool).
March 2nd, 2009 at 12:35 am
And, as an astronomer yourself, the reason YOU won’t deign to image the asteroid named after you is . . . what, exactly? Just wondering.
March 2nd, 2009 at 2:00 am
ChazInMT:
Extract from Wikipedia — Asteroid belt (click on my name for the link):
March 2nd, 2009 at 2:13 am
Davidlpf:
Only when he’s not wearing his baseball cap!
March 2nd, 2009 at 8:35 am
Blue Fire, given that your name links to an Electric Universe site, I can assume you are impenetrable to logic, but had it occurred to you that maybe I don’t have a telescope/camera that can do it? But thanks for trolling here. I’d give you a 2/10, because the answer was so obvious.Edited to add: my mistake about the URL, it’s eclectic not electric. My apologies; that’s what I get for being snarky. My apologies to Blue Fire.
March 2nd, 2009 at 9:10 am
Hi, Phil
I embarked on a similar quest several years ago to help a dear friend, the late Richard Emmons, see his “pet rock”, 5391 Emmons – named for him by the late Eleanor Helin. I had help in getting it imaged as well. For the story, see http://www.twcac.org/onlinehorizon/rock_hounds.htm and http://www.twcac.org/onlinehorizon/5391emmonsindex.htm
Thanks for reminding me of that fun time. And I hope you get a taker.
March 2nd, 2009 at 9:28 am
Err… Phil, I think that your morning coffee had not kicked-in yet and, consequently, you have misinterpreted Blue Fire’s web-site, which is called “Eclectic [_E_C_L_E_C_T_I_C_] Universe”, not “Electric Universe”.
Definition of eclectic.
March 2nd, 2009 at 10:53 am
Man, that just ruins one of my favorite 80’s video games…
(Unless the ship was REALLY big…)