Earth-Crossing Asteroid 2000 EW70

With a little bit of help from the Minor Planet Ephemeris Service I succeeded in tracking down the recent LINEAR discovery of 2000 EW70 which is an "earth crosser" and member of the Aten family. I thought the moon may have been too bright, but after plotting the field in Megastar with the asteroid position marked at half hourly intervals I began imaging the ephemeris position and slewing each field to the North. I  hoped I would pick out an "extra star". After four or five fields the asteroid was quite easily seen as a short streak of light in 20 sec exposures. The listed magnitude was 13.5 and the rapid motion was easily evident at 30" arc/minute. It reaches its maximum apparent motion on 2000 March 24th 0000h UT at one degree/hour when it will lie at a distance of 0.013 a.u. (5 times the earth-moon distance). Images taken with 50 cm f/4 and SXF CCD.

Here's a rather jumpy animation of 15 images showing the asteroid movement over a 5 minute period. It was taken 2000 March 22nd 00:06h - 00:11h U.T. It looks rather like the motion of a cosmic maggot! Each image of the asteroid is elongated as it moved during each 20 sec CCD exposure.

David Strange
Worth Hill Observatory
Dorset U.K.