Visiting Asteroid Caught on Video Above Santa Barbara

At about 7:56 AM PDT on the morning of Wednesday, September 3, an asteroid discovered only 16 days previously made a close flyby of the Earth, coming between us and the Moon at a distance of about 135,465 miles (0.57 Lunar Distance).

The asteroid is provisionally designated 2025 QD8, and is estimated to be between 55 and 124 feet in diameter, estimated from its reflectivity in infrared light. This is similar in size to the Chelyabinsk impactor that detonated over Russia in 2013.

Since I was already up taking citizen science data on an occultation by another asteroid, and QD8 would be well placed in our sky and bright enough for my equipment to image, I made a video of it as it screamed in at 3 AM, going about 8 miles per second (almost 29,000 MPH).

QD8 is classed as an NEA (Near Earth Asteroid), and specifically as a member of the Apollo group of Earth-crossing asteroids . You can view details of its orbit on the NASA Solar System Dynamics page, linked below.

Here’s the video, with QD8 zooming through the stars of Aquarius from lower right to upper left between 2:57:31 AM and 3:04:24 AM PDT.

References for a cloudy night

Asteroid Provisional Designations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_designation_in_astronomy

Near Earth Object Groups: https://catalina.lpl.arizona.edu/faq/what-are-neo-groups

NASA/JPL Solar System Dynamics for 2025 QD8: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=2025%20QD8&view=VOP

Hasta nebula,
Chuck