Live, from Brookline: It's streaming video of Asteroid 2012 DA14!

 
Brookline's Clay Observatory


Live streaming video of the asteroid begins at 6 pm

Hey, look: scientists tell us there's absolutely no connection between that crazy fucking meteor shit in Russia (click the link for the awesome NYTimes story, written by former Phoenix staffer Ellen Barry) and the huge-ass asteroid that's hurtling within a mere 17,000 miles of earth this afternoon.

But can you really be sure? Yes. Yes you can, because . . . science. But you might want to keep an eye on the thing anyway, because how often do we get asteroids photo-bombing the atmosphere? Uh, maybe don't google that one too hard. 

The bad news is Asteroid 2012 DA14 is passing by us during daylight hours, making it impossible to eyeball or those of us in the Northern Hemisphere until it's already too far away to see with the naked eye.

The good news is that there's an observatory in Brookline that's live-streaming the asteroid beginning at 6 pm EST. 

The Clay Center Observatory in Brookline has what it calls "one of the largest publicly accesible telescopes in the United States," and because of its East Coast location "will be among the first large telescopes in the country to provide imagery of the asteroid as night falls on February 15." 

The Observatory is located at Brookline's Dexter and Southfield Schools, and has been using its high-school students to help monitor the asteroid as it gets close. Here's a gif of that shit:

Click on the video at the top of this post to UStream the asteroid's progress in real time, and click here to read more about the Clay Observatory's asteroid-watching efforts.