How to see an asteroid from quite a long way away
A terrific set of Goldstone radar images of a good-sized near-Earth asteroids named 2010 JL33 was posted to the JPL website yesterday. They also posted a movie version but something about these pixelated radar image series absolutely begs for them to be displayed as an old-school animated GIF, so I made one. I am amazed by how much detail of the shape of this 1.8-kilometer-across asteroid you can see with “images” that are constructed from ….