Saskatchewan stargazers capture asteroid videos

Some Saskatchewan stargazers were the toast of the astronomy community this week after capturing video of an asteroid whizzing by the Earth.

Vance Petriew of White City and Tenho Tuomi of Lucky Lake had a close encounter with asteroid 2004 BL86.

It's about 300 metres in diameter, according to NASA, and small by the standards of most heavenly bodies, but large enough to see, at its closest approach, with a small telescope.

In a homemade observatory located on his farm, Tuomi tracked the asteroid with his three-inch telescope and scored a series of still images of the big rock moving by at around 1 a.m. CST on Monday morning. He assembled all the stills into a video.

He said the clouds parted at the right time.

"I was just lucky," he said, adding that he's had people congratulating him after the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada tweeted out the seven-second video.

Also happy for a break in the clouds was Petriew, one of Saskatchewan's best known amateur astronomers.

He captured video of the asteroid in his hometown of White City, just east of Regina, using a Celestron CPC-800 telescope and SBIG ST-7XME camera.

His video compresses several minutes of asteroid movement into a few seconds.

"The asteroid looks like a jellybean because of the asteroid moving during the eight seconds the shutter was open and also because of poor tracking of the telescope due to clouds," he said.

Petriew has a history of spotting elusive objects in the sky — he once discovered a comet that now bears his name. 

Tuomi has been at his hobby since 2003. He says it was fun to observe BL86 and receive kudos from his fellow astronomy buffs.

"I was the famous one this time," he said.