2012 DA14 – tracking with binocular

Really beautiful day was on February 15th, 2013.
I got up at 3 am and with my binocular 20×80 and tripod I went to a schoolyard near my home. I got ready for the event until 4 am, when finally I caught the little dot.

I started with star hopping from Minkar, Epsilon Corvi, and I went down until Xi Hydrae, where at 4 am I would have seen the asteroid.
The problem was that the altitude was really low, just 15 degree and a high building would have screwed up my day, so I decided to go up a little more until the building would not have been a problem.

It wasn’t really easy because the seen in Seoul, South Korea, is REALLY BAD! anyway, no moon, sky really clear from clouds, so was kind of perfect day. So I was able to put my view between Gamma and Beta Crateris, and at 4 hour and 18 minutes I saw this little dot of mag. +7.9 running really fast on the field of my binocular.

Really Exciting! I followed the asteroid for an hour, and was really a beautiful night. At around 4:40 it passed by a beautiful and rich field of stars between Crater, Virgo, Leo and Sextans constellation, and at 5 o’clock it passed by a rich field of faint NGC galaxies that unfortunately I was unable to see.

For the accurate position of the asteroid I used SkySafari Plus on my Ipod, where I was able to see in real time the exact position with a small error in Right Ascension but totally permissible.
However I wasn’t able to use my pc software, Cartes Du Ciel, to track the path of the asteroid, where on the contrary the ephemerides were totally wrong.

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