Asteroid 152637

[John Garrett]

Tonight is the nearest approach of Asteroid 152637, a kilometer-sized rock passing at about 2.6 million kilometers. It is 10+ magnitude.

Attached are images I took last night 10 minutes apart. Each image is a 20-second exposure through my 3-inch scope at F5 and ISO 400. Fortunately, I have a very wide field of view that compensated for my error in pointing to the predicted coordinates.

The gif animation is cropped to about 35% of the original field of view in my 3-inch telescope.

In my original images, the 20-second exposure shows the asteroid as a streik, so if you can find it in your scope, you'll see it moving against the background. Good luck.

jg

[Jim Sappington]

Nice catch, John. That is a tough target. With all of them flying around up there, seems it would be difficult to distinguish it from a satellite!  

Jim

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[John Garrett]

Good point, Jim. I don't know that it's not a satellite. I could have confirmation bias. However, my experience is that satellites move faster against the background. For example, I have a wide-field photo of a comet that has satellite streaks of uniform length, suggesting they are all in orbit at about the same height. Of course, only the fast moving satellites would be noticeable in the attached photo (which is about 5-15 seconds; I forget the exact exposure). However, there is a hard cutoff in this photo: 11 of similar lengths, but no distribution including slower or faster moving satellites. This leads me to think that anything as slow as what I observed Friday, must be beyond earth's satellite zone. 

jg

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[Jim Sappington]

Seems very logical, John. I agree with your thinking. 

On Jun 28, 2026, at 8:57 AM, John Garrett <garr...@gmail.com> wrote:



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