Whew, that was close!

Did you know that an asteroid flew past Earth last night? On the left is the trajectory. The 270 meter asteroid (about the size of three football fields), known as 2000 EM26, streaked past Earth at a distance of about 2.1 million miles (3.4 million km). Just for comparison, the mean distance from the Earth to the Moon is 238,900 miles (384,400 km). So this asteroid was about 8.8 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon at its closest point, and it will be traveling about 17,000 mph.

This object is classified as potentially hazardous when it was discovered in 2000 because of its projected path and because of its size. There were 32 observations in 9 days and then something interesting happened; it disappeared! Based on the trajectory determined in the those 9 days, this asteroid made close approaches in 2002, 2003, 2006, 2009, 2011 and 2012 and yet it was still never rediscovered! This asteroid is very faint, aka very low albedo, and thus hard to track.

Slooh, a community observatory where you can view live through a telescope, generally shows interesting astronomical events; transits, asteroid flybys, etc. Slooh also tracks newly discovered

asteroids and submits the data to the Minor Planet Center. This is in hopes of never loosing an asteroid again. 

Slooh hosted a "live" event last night for the asteroid flyby, which you can re-watch here. 

Spoiler Alert: Still haven't rediscovered it!! The Dubai Astronomy Group was feeding in live images of the sky of where the asteroid should have been based on its trajectory, again determined 14 years ago, but nothing could be deduced.

This asteroid is now nicknamed Moby Dick for its elusiveness.

We need your help! Amateur astronomers, help us find this asteroid before it is too far away! Check out some more information here.