Asteroid ‘Juno’ Makes Cameo Appearance

September 22, 2009 — Get out your binoculars now. If you don’t, you won’t have another good chance to see the asteroid Juno until 2018. On Monday, the sun turned a spotlight on Juno, giving that bulky lump of rock a rare featured cameo in the night sky. Those who get out to a dark, unpolluted sky in the next few days should be able to spot the asteroid's silvery glint near the planet Uranus with a pair of binoculars. Toward the end of the week, you’ll find it closer to the constellation Aquarius. "It can usually be seen by a good amateur telescope, but the guy on the street doesn't usually get a chance to observe it," said Don Yeomans, manager of the Near Earth Object Program Office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "This is going to be as bright as it gets until 2018." Juno, one of the first asteroids discovered, is thought to be the parent of many of the meteorites that rain on Earth. The asteroid is composed mostly of hardy silicate rock, which is tough enough that fragments broken off by collisions can often survive a trip through Earth's atmosphere. Though pockmarked by bang-ups with other asteroids, Juno is large; in fact, it is the tenth largest asteroid. It measures about 145 miles in diameter, or about one-fifteenth the diameter of the moon. The asteroid, which orbits the sun on a track between Mars and Jupiter, was at its brightest on Monday, when it zoomed around the sun at about 49,000 miles per hour. The extra brightness came from its position in a direct line with the sun and its proximity to Earth. But don’t worry — the asteroid is still be about 112 million miles away, so there is no danger it will fall toward Earth. Skywatchers with telescopes should be able to see Juno from now until the end of the year, but it is most visible to binoculars in late September. Look for Juno now near midnight a few degrees east of the brighter glow of Uranus and in the constellation Pisces. It will look like a gray dot in the sky, and each night it will appear slightly more southwest of its location the night before. By September 25, it will be closer to the constellation Aquarius and best seen before midnight.		The asteroid Juno was photographed in 2003 with a special optics system on the Hooker telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory. The researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who took the picture used varying wavelengths of light as measured in nanometers, starting with cyan and going into the infrared. Image credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Find Uranus or constellation Aquarius to locate asteroid Juno in the sky. Image credit: NASA/JPL

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