Last updated 22 Sep 2024

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Asteroid Gallery

2004 DF2 (small Apollo rapidly receding from Earth)

At 1am UT on 17th Feb 2004 this Apollo had come to within 2.8 lunar distances (LD) of Earth, but at that time was in the far southern sky at declination -56°. LINEAR discovered it just over two days later when it had reached declination -7° and was already 9 LD away at magnitude +19 and fading fast.

Modra Observatory (118) confirmed the object 16 hours after discovery and it was imaged at Great Shefford an hour after that when it was at a distance of 13 LD (image A). A few hours later it was caught by the Tenagra II observatory which allowed the discovery announcement to be made in MPEC 2004-D17.

Just 23 hours after first imaging it at Great Shefford,  image B was obtained by which time it had receded to 18 LD and had faded over a magnitude.

This small NEO was last recorded with the 1.52-m telescope at Calar Alto in Spain, just over 24 hours after image B was taken and only three days after discovery.


 

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