It's the one you don't see that gets you.
SPACE VID: Watch JUMBO ASTEROID 2000 EM26 buzzing Earth
If there's nothing on TV tonight, or you're suffering from insomnia, readers of The Register can always tune in to an asteroid flyby, broadcast live online by the Slooh Observatory. Slooh's cameras will start streaming commentary and footage of near-Earth space rock 2000 EM26, here and in the player below, from 6pm Pacific …
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Tuesday 18th February 2014 22:16 GMT Big-nosed Pengie
Re: As big as three football fields??
One thing that bothers me about this new and now universal unit of measurement is which brand of football it's referring to. I assume that a gridiron field and an Australian Rules field are not the same size, and that neither is the same size as a rugby union field.
This Balkanisation of units is going to get us into trouble one day.
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Tuesday 18th February 2014 15:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: As big as three football fields??
" Please ensure future Earth menacing asteroid sizes are given in El-Reg units"
And compatible units. The blighters are quoting me an area when I'd foolishly assumed the object might have a volume.
Maths boffins! Assuming a finite area and infintiely thin object, the minimum volume is presumably nil. Is there a maximum volume you could associate with a given surface area?
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Tuesday 18th February 2014 16:30 GMT 's water music
Re: As big as three football fields??
if you mean the maximum volume enclosed for a given surface area then it would be a sphere shirley? with diameter 2*SQRT(S/4pi) where S=3 Football Pitches (or a little under 600 nano Wales) giving a diameter of some 222 linguine. So the volume would be pretty close on 16 Olympic-sized swimming pools (478620154 walnuts).
hth
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Tuesday 18th February 2014 08:13 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
Needs hefty telescope indeed
My 8" can do mag 14 under good conditions, mag 16 is about 6.25 times fainter, so requires 2.5 times more aperture at least, or a massive 20" scope, and that would be borderline. Roll on that 32" Dobsonian (when serious men build telescopes, they don't mess about).
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Tuesday 18th February 2014 08:57 GMT Dr Trevor Marshall
Live Video was great on CHROME, "please wait" on FIREFOX
At least that was what I found. After the live broadcast had ended everybody would have been watching the same recording.
So was the 'fault' in YouTube, in the way Slooh set up the live broadcast (there are user configuration toggles in the interface), or in Flash player??
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Tuesday 18th February 2014 10:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Today? Today where?
"...from 6pm Pacific Standard Time today (9pm Eastern Standard Time, 2am UTC, 1pm Australian EST)."
2am UTC today (today right now in the UK is 18/2/2014) implies that for UK residents, its been and gone. For US residents, its coming later today. I'm sure that can't be right. Which is a shame really because I genuinely don't know if I've missed it or not (I'm in the UK).
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Tuesday 18th February 2014 10:30 GMT VulcanV5
Re: Today? Today where?
I thought I was on GMT. What the heck is UTC? Something to do with pasteurised milk?????
I do wish El Reg would remember that many of its readers are English and have neither been metricated nor pasteurised. Would it therefore be asking too much for this article to be updated using Standard Received Timing, viz: "when the big hand is on . . . . . . . . . and the little hand is on . . . . . . . then the asteroid will be available to view." Thank you.
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Tuesday 18th February 2014 11:28 GMT Alex Bailey
Re: Today? Today where?
And here's me, being British, wondering why everybody has a problem with timezones and the metric system. Are we less intelligent than the rest of the planet who do seem to be able to cope with these?
That said, the times given for this ARE confusing. Has it happened or is it yet to happen?
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Tuesday 18th February 2014 19:08 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: Today? Today where?
Thank you.
No!!
That Brutish Empire thing with all its gay trappings was dead around the time Keynes wrote "The Economic Consequences of the Peace".
It just took until Maggie to actually make everyone aware that the empire had been resting for some time and was now pining for the fjords with all the smells that go with this. Understandably, she was blamed for it.
Get over it! Adopt metric units now!! [Revolutionary Music swells]
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Tuesday 18th February 2014 20:18 GMT Mike Flex
Re: Today? Today where?
"I thought I was on GMT. What the heck is UTC?"
UTC is what we are currently on in the UK. The BBC persists in incorrectly calling it GMT.
UTC is derived from atomic clocks. GMT is derived from astronomical observations. These days atomic clocks are more stable than the rotation of the Earth so UTC is tweaked to keep it close to GMT, by adding or subtracting leap-seconds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Mean_Time
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Tuesday 18th February 2014 20:06 GMT Mike Flex
Re: Today? Today where?
"Which is a shame really because I genuinely don't know if I've missed it or not (I'm in the UK)."
Yes and No.
The live broadcast was last night (2 am UK time overnight between 17 and 18th Feb) so you missed that.
However the telescope that was supposed to be used was frozen and the programme was strung together from recordings of earlier events and computer simulations. So, no, you didn't miss a live event 'cause it didn't happen. The video on the article page is a recording of the 2am broadcast so you can check what you didn't miss.
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