30 Mar
2010
30 Mar
'10
7:53 p.m.
Interesting thread on the Minor Planet Mailing List today. Seems NASA's WISE has found something now called 2010 DF64 "...with a perihelion distance of 1.42 AU and an assumed diameter of 6151 km." It goes on to say: "High overhead in Taurus, it is projected to move into Orion by midmonth and attain a whopping 3.7 magnitude." For scale Ceres is a bit less than 1,000 km an doesn't get brighter than about 6.9. One post suggested it's an early April Fool's joke but others have said the report is real. Others have suggested a problem with the data. I'm in the doubters camp. But I'm also try to image it. Interesting... patrick