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09/15/15 – Ephemeris – Not another hoax again: This one’s a supposed asteroid collision
Ephemeris for Tuesday, September 15th. The Sun will rise at 7:21. It’ll be up for 12 hours and 32 minutes, setting at 7:53. The Moon, 2 days past new, will set at 9:02 this evening.
There is a bogus prediction from the Internet that been circulating for a month or so. I missed it until a couple of days ago because I visit reputable astronomical web sites. I check near earth asteroids on spaceweather.com, and there is nothing known as of now that’s 22 meters of larger in size that will come within 2 million miles of the Earth this month. The dead giveaway that this prediction is bogus is the fact that the impact point is specific, near Puerto Rico, but the impact time is vague, between the 15th and 28th of September. An object orbiting the Sun, like the Earth travels at 18 and a half miles a second give or take, the asteroid at a comparable velocity, so the impact time would have to be known to the second. On top of the Earth’s position, it also rotates
Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
Here is a link to NASA’s JPL on the subject.
NASA isn’t the only authority on asteroid orbits and positions. The Minor Planet Center is part of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), and currently operated under a grant from NASA is the clearinghouse for asteroid positions and orbits. Some discoveries and positions are supplied by amateur astronomers who aren’t beholden to any government, so there isn’t any conspiracy to keep the knowledge from the public.
Stupid Internet posts: No, gravity won’t be canceled January 4th.
Looks like the hoaxsters are at it again. Seems someone dusted off Sir. Patrick Moore’s April Fool’s joke from long ago and dressed it up as a phony NASA tweet and sent it out 9 days ago. Supposedly on January 4th, 2015 an alignment of Jupiter and Pluto will cancel gravity on the Earth for a few minutes that day. Both Newton and Einstein would be ticked off at that. Neither of their theories of gravity would predict anything so stupid. Besides Jupiter and Pluto are at nearly opposite parts of the sky. They don’t align with anything.
Don’t take my word for it as a lowly amateur astronomer. Check out the (A real astrophysics PhD) Bad Astronomer Phil Plait’s post: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/12/24/zero_g_day_nope.html.
Here’s a post from EarthSky with the same sentiments.
However January 4th, 2014 is special. It’s Perihelion Day, the day of the year the Earth is closest to the Sun. So break out the sunscreen, especially if you live in the southern hemisphere, where it’s summer now. The biggest effect we’ll see is that winter is the shortest season for us by a couple of days compared to summer, the longest season. The Earth moves its fastest in it’s orbit of the Sun at perihelion.
Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog 