© NASA/Galileo 1993. Pictured asteroid is 243 Ida.

Asteroid 532 Herculina at opposition

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Asteroids feed

Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

Asteroid 532 Herculina will be well placed, lying in the constellation Bootes, well above the horizon for much of the night.

Regardless of your location on the Earth, 532 Herculina will reach its highest point in the sky around midnight local time.

From Ashburn, it will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 20:48, when it reaches an altitude of 21° above your eastern horizon. It will then reach its highest point in the sky at 01:55, 69° above your southern horizon. It will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:35, 38° above your western horizon.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The geometry of the alignment

This optimal positioning occurs when it makes its closest approach to the point in the sky directly opposite to the Sun – an event termed opposition. Since the Sun reaches its greatest distance below the horizon at midnight, the point opposite to it is highest in the sky at the same time.

At around the same time that 532 Herculina passes opposition, it also makes its closest approach to the Earth – termed its perigee – making it appear at its brightest in the night sky. This happens because when 532 Herculina lies opposite to the Sun in the night sky, the solar system is lined up so that 532 Herculina, the Earth and the Sun lie in a straight line with the Earth in the middle, on the same side of the Sun as 532 Herculina.

On this occasion, 532 Herculina will pass within 1.344 AU of us, reaching a peak brightness of magnitude 9.1. Nonetheless, even at its brightest, 532 Herculina is a faint object beyond the reach of the naked eye; binoculars or a telescope of moderate aperture are needed.

Finding 532 Herculina

The chart below indicates the path of 532 Herculina across the sky around the time of opposition.

It was produced using StarCharter and is available for download, either on dark background, in PNG, PDF or SVG formats, or on a light background, in PNG, PDF or SVG formats.

The position of 532 Herculina at the moment of opposition will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude
Asteroid 532 Herculina 13h53m20s 18°56'N Bootes 9.1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 8 Apr 2024

The sky on 8 April 2024
Sunrise
06:40
Sunset
19:40
Twilight ends
21:13
Twilight begins
05:07

29-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

0%

29 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:43 13:26 20:09
Venus 06:13 12:17 18:20
Moon 06:35 13:06 19:52
Mars 05:21 10:58 16:35
Jupiter 08:06 15:05 22:04
Saturn 05:27 11:04 16:41
All times shown in EDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed from orbital elements made available by Ted Bowell of the Lowell Observatory. The conversion to geocentric coordinates was performed using the position of the Earth recorded in the DE430 ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

The star chart above shows the positions and magnitudes of stars as they appear in the Tycho catalogue. The data was reduced by the author and plotted using PyXPlot. A gnomonic projection of the sky has been used; celestial coordinates are indicated in the J2000.0 coordinate system.

Image credit

© NASA/Galileo 1993. Pictured asteroid is 243 Ida.

Share

Ashburn

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

Color scheme