Viewing asteroid close approaches

Hi,

I've developed a web interface to make it easy to find visible close-
approaching asteroids. In a nutshell, it combines information from
the Minor Planet Center's forthcoming close approaches web page, and
their Ephemerides service to determine how bright a close approach
will be and how fast it will move in the sky.

It also plots a five-day path of the asteroids in the sky, and allows
you to make custom plots for your location, which show visibility.

http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~fine/Astro/flybys.cgi

It should be considered to be in BETA testing. I'd appreciate if people
could check the custom visibility plots to make sure they're actually
correct. I'd also appreciate feedback about problems, desired features,
etc.

At this point, 2004 XP14 is a juicy candidate for those of us in the
northern hemisphere. It's flying by on July 3rd. North American
viewers will have the best view, as it will move as fast as 8
arcminutes per minute. Other viewers may not see it moving so fast,
but they can still see it as bright as magnitude 11. Of course, new
discoveries are sometimes added at the last minute, so you never know
when something interesting might pop up.

Note that this is a personal project. I work as a system administrator
in the same institution where the Minor Planet Center can be found,
but in a different group.

tom

wow

excellent work