On Friday, February 15th, 2013, near-Earth asteroid 2012 DA14 did a flyby of our planet — the closest approach ever of an object of its size (30 meters in diameter). Photographer Colin Legg of Western Australia decided to capture the close pass in a time-lapse video, and set up his cameras after midnight around 220 miles east of Perth.

He ended up capturing the amazing video above, while captures a shooting star burning a trail across the sky while DA14 slowly travels through the shot. The video also shows how much random stuff in the sky you can see if you have eyes/cameras sensitive enough to see it.
Read more…

Walkthroughs of photographs that aren’t easily reproducible (or are impossible to reproduce) might not be very useful to many, but it’s still interesting to learn how rare shots come about. An example would be the photograph above, captured by photographer Bryan Hanna last week. Hanna was aiming to capture a long-exposure nighttime photograph of a landscape in the foreground and the night sky in the background, but he accidentally snagged something even better: a fireball zipping across the sky in just the right area in the frame!
Read more…