Earth and her *3* moons?!?

[furtech]

While looking up an unrelated topic, I came across an interesting event that I hadn't heard about: Earth's third moon.

*THREE* moons??? Well, actually no. Not even two, really. But Earth does have an extra "faux" moon, named "Cruithne" (thanks a LOT for a name only Celts can pronounce!) was discovered by European astronomers in 1986. Technically, it's not really a satellite of Earth, but an asteroid that shares its unusual horseshoe-shaped orbit with the Earth and the sun.

The "third" satellite was discovered in late 2002 by amateur astronomer Bill Yeung in a backyard observatory in Arizona. Astronomy is one of the few areas left where serious amateurs have a chance against huge operations to make major discoveries (with an infrastructure that protects and encourages such discoveries!). Read the article...it's fascinating!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2251386.stm

And:
http://cooltech.iafrica.com/technews/157576.htm

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=9319

The resolution:
http://www.birtwhi.demon.co.uk/GallerySatelliteJ002E3.htm

Comments

[skorzy.livejournal.com]

That's kind of neat, especially about Cruithne (Krut-NEE!) :P

Though.. I'm reluctant to call anything man-made or artificial as a "moon". That Apollo 12 booster rocket is really just another piece of space junk orbiting this planet. There's thousands of those already. What sets it apart from other pieces to make it a "moon"? Its atypical orbit?

[furtech.livejournal.com]

Oh, they pretty much confirmed that it's "an object in near earth orbit" (ie, space junk) but I thought it was cool that when this (lucky) guy first reported it, it -could- have been a captured asteroid...and even discovering that it's an old moon booster is really neat, in a Star Trek/NOMAD kind of way! I used to eat stuff like this up as a kid (read "Science News" the moment it arrived!). If you read the (brief) last link, it flipped out of Earth orbit the next year (but may be re-captured in about 30 years).

And Cruithne is worse than that-- the article says: "Cruithne, pronounced "Croo-een-ya"" *Gak!*

[mistahbojangles.livejournal.com]

For some reason I'm reminded of the moon joke in Bruce Almighty and of the consequences of Bruce's romantic excess. :D

[farallon.livejournal.com]

Heh, yeah, like just the other day an unknown nova/variable star was discovered near M27. Here is my non-discovery image of it taken last night:

http://tinyurl.com/8vwdm

And just a couple of months a go was an amateur discovery of a super nova in M51!

New stuff is happening all the time, and the big scopes are all being used for more specific purposes so it'sup to the backyard astronomer to find everything else that goes on :)

[furtech.livejournal.com]

I'm still a science geek at heart...I -love- to hear about things like this. Even when they turn out to be less-than-spectacular, it's great to speculate and just plain -think-! I'm still pretty jazzed: that we can actually re-capture something everyone had pretty much forgotten about thirty years later...I'd really love to see what the thing looks like now (especially considering the materials tests that NASA did in the 80's).

Wow-- I didn't hear about the supernova discovery either! I need to subscribe to something...is "Science News" still being published?

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the links!