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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