When Colin Legg went out to record the pass of Asteroid 2012 AD14, he got so much more...

Night Wanderers from Colin Legg on Vimeo.

The asteroid, a whole clutch of satellites, and a great meteor photobomb! Great catch by Colin Legg, of Western Australia.

As Colin describes it:

Asteroid 2012 DA 14 passed very close to the Earth on February 16th 2013, local time. Australians, and Western Australians in particular were in a great position to observe the asteroid, being on the night side of Earth as it flew by.

I captured this footage starting 3.24 am from a dark sky site 350 km east of Perth. Just after camera rolling, a beautiful meteor burned across the sky, and amazingly, passed right through my camera's field of view, lingering while the debris train swept up and out of view. In addition, the sky was also very busy swarming with countless man made satellites. The asteroid is the bright object at left moving down the screen.

The scene was captured at 50 mm, iso 8000, f/2.2, 8 second shutter, 9 second intervals.
For more details and other examples of my work, check out - facebook.com/ColinLeggPhotography

Related articles

• Asteroid 2012 DA14 caught on camera by Canberra astronomer Dave Herald
• Night sky viewing coming up - ISS, Comets, Flares and a Spy Shuttle
• Take a full tour of the International Space Station with former Commander Suni Williams
• Oh my. This puts it all in perspective wonderfully...

Asteroid 2012 DA14 caught on camera by Canberra astronomer Dave Herald

Amateur astronomer at Murrumbateman, near Canberra in Australia, Dave Herald has captured a number of photos of near-Earth object (NEO) asteroid 2012 DA14 as it closed in on Earth prior to its incredibly close pass this morning. This photo was four hours before closest point:

His description:

Image is a 4-min exposure from 15H 01m UT to 15H 05m. This bracketed the time when the asteroid was furthest south from the observing site (E07). The image indicates the path was about 7" south of predicted.

This is at five hours:

Increased speed, and change in direction as the asteroid gets close to the south pole, are readily apparent. Image is a 3-min exposure. Asteroid is at -85.4 deg.

This is at six hours:

A meteorite has exploded over Russian cities, with damage to buildings. Amazing footage

(I've progressively updated this post throughout the news coming in on 15 February and again the next several days, so please check the latest information at the bottom. And don't expect quality writing—it was just a case of bang up the updates as quick as possible as they came in via my various astronomy and social media sources.

UPDATE 20150618: seems a number of the video clips through this article have been taken down. However, I'll leave most of the post as it was on the day, as it would take a lot of rewriting, and would lose a lot of the flow of the day...)

This is an incredible bit of footage of a large meteorite coming over a Russian city and exploding.

At 50 seconds into this clip, you'll see an amazing flare that gives you an idea of just how close and bright this meteorite was. The description reads: "Above Chelyabinsk was meteor rain: some houses shattered windows, some residents received cuts."



In this clip, you can see the contrail left behind, and then (off camera) you hear an loud explosions and followed by multiple smaller explosions and alarms in the background:



Most amazing footage yet of the moment of the explosion: