Asteroid Close Encounter Tonight! Bruce Willis On Standby.

We’re getting fucking buzzed tonight! I’m not talking the alcoholic-tinged pukey sense. I’m talking there’s an asteroid coming! Meet YU55. It’s a 1,300 foot piece of space refuse, and it’ll be coming closer to us than the moon.

The end (isn’t) nigh!

Boing Boing:

Don’t forget that a 1,300 foot asteroid, about the size of an aircraft carrier, will fly by Earth tomorrow even closer to us than the moon. Don’t worry, it won’t hit. It’ll be tricky to catch a glimpse, but you might spot it if you have a telescope with at least a 6-inch mirror, says Scott Fisher, the director of the National Science Foundation’s Division of Astronomical Sciences. From Space.com:

“It turns out that YU55 is going to be pretty faint when it flies by,” he explained. “To make it even more difficult to observe … it will be moving VERY quickly across the sky as it passes.”

“The best time to observe it would be in the early evening on November 8th from the east coast of the US,” Fisher said. “However! It is going to be VERY faint, even at its closest approach. You will need a decent sized telescope to be able to actually see the object as it flies by.”

Sounds pretty awesome. Which means I’ll totally forget about it until it’s too late.

The event marks the first time since 1976 that an object as large as asteroid 2005 YU55 has passed this close to Earth, Fisher said. The next time an asteroid of similar size will approach close to Earth will be in 2028.