The Next Closest Asteroid Passes

 An asteroid pass will be on June 14, 2023, when asteroid 2023 LO will pass Earth at a distance of 1.1 million miles. 2023 LO is a small asteroid, about the size of a bus, and it poses no threat to Earth.

Here is a table of the next five closest asteroid passes to Earth:

Asteroid	Date	Closest Approach (miles)
2023 LO	June 14, 2023	1.1 million
2022 WN4	July 1, 2023	2.57 million
2023 LZ	July 12, 2023	197,000
2020 DB5	July 23, 2023	2.68 million
2023 HL	August 1, 2023	3.22 million

Meteor Showers in 2023

 The next major meteor shower will be the Perseids, which will peak on the night of August 12-13, 2023. The Perseids are known for producing bright, fast meteors, and under ideal conditions, you can see up to 100 meteors per hour during the peak of the shower. The moon will be 10% full on this night, so it may make it a little more difficult to see fainter meteors, but you should still be able to see a good number of shooting stars.

Here are some other major meteor showers that will occur in 2023:

• Lyrids: April 21-22
• Eta Aquarids: May 4-5
• Delta Aquarids: July 29-30
• Draconids: October 8-10
• Orionids: October 20-21
• Leonids: November 17-18
• Geminids: December 13-14

To best view a meteor shower, find a dark location away from city lights and lie on your back with your feet facing east. Allow your eyes to adjust to the darkness for about 30 minutes before looking up. You should be able to see meteors streaking across the sky from all directions.

Fireball Across the Northeastern United States

With over 1500 reports of a fireball seen from Maine to Maryland, the American Meteor Society derived a geometric impact point of the incoming object to an area  south west of Carlisle, New York.  The fireball was seen at around 6:35 EST the evening of December 29th.  Many reports described the fireball as being greenish on color as it streak across the sky with a tail.  Others describe the fireball as being whitish in color.

Quadrantids: The First Meteor Shower of 2015

If you are out and about tonight, you may be able to catch a glimpse of the Quadrantids meteor shower.  They will be peaking Friday night into Saturday morning.  You may also be able to catch a few on the remaining nights of the first weekend of this new year.  The viewing will be tough going as are near a full moon which may was out some of the fainter meteors.  Clouds and precipitation will also mare viewing conditions throughout much of the eastern United States.

Pluto: More there that meets the eye!

The debate whether to include Pluto as a planet in our solar system is winding down with decreasing acrimony between astronomers, hobbyists, and other conspiracy theorists about the status of Pluto. You can still dispute whether you think Pluto is a real planet or is some other object. The overriding trend is clear. Recent discoveries about our solar system show that Pluto is a unique object when compared to the other eight planets in the solar system.

By the time the New Horizons mission makes its closest approach to Pluto there in June 2015, many more discoveries will arise, allowing Pluto to shine further in its own right. New Horizons will offer us the closest glimpse ever of Pluto.

Pluto can be classified as a system of objects, as if it is a binary dwarf planet in combination with Charon and its smaller moons. Both Pluto and Charon are tidally locked onto each other. Pluto makes a circular orbit about itself in step with the rotation that Charon makes around Pluto. The other objects rotating around the twins of Charon and Pluto are Nix, Hydra, Styx, and Kerberos. Each of these moons have small diameters, in the tens of kilometers, when compared to Charon.  

The Jade Rabbit (玉兔) set to Land on the Moon on December 14th.

Last week, China hurled a Long March rocket toward the moon. The rocket is carrying a vehicle that was called Jade Rabbit that, if all goes according to plan, will land on the surface of the moon around December 14^th. The last time any object blasted off from earth landed on the surface of the moon was way back in 1976, when the Russians undertook the Luna 24 mission.

Jade Rabbit, pronounced Yùtù in Chinese, is a gold foil covered buggy that has six wheels and is clustered with instruments. Included are soil samplers, telescopes for examining ultraviolet light from distant stars. The remote lunar buggy will also transmit images taken of Earth back to its home planets.