Asteroid 2003 UV11 will fly past Earth on Oct. 29th and 30th (2010) at a distance of only 1.2 million miles. Its minimum (closest) approach to Earth happens at 02:24:00 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) on October 30th.
Experienced amateur astronomers should have little trouble photographing the 600-meter wide space rock as it glides through the constellation Pegasus on Friday night, glowing about as brightly as a 12th magnitude star. Observers in North America and Europe are favored.
Have a look at Tom’s Asteroid Flybys Page to see where the asteroid is located–you can customize it for your location and see when it is visible.
NASA’s Goldstone and Arecibo radars are pinging the asteroid as it passes to study its shape and trajectory.
Asteroid 2003 UV11 ephemeris.
2003 UV11 3-D orbit.
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Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is a term originally referring to mean solar time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London. It is now sometimes used to refer to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) when this is viewed as a time zone, although strictly UTC is an atomic time scale which only approximates GMT in the old sense. It is also used to refer to Universal Time (UT), which is the astronomical concept that directly replaced the original GMT in 1928. Observations at the Greenwich observatory ended in 1954.
In the UK, GMT is the official time only during winter; during summer British Summer Time is used. GMT is substantially equivalent to Western European Time.[citation needed]
Noon Greenwich Mean Time is not necessarily the moment when the noon sun crosses the Greenwich meridian (and reaches its highest point in the sky in Greenwich) because of Earth's uneven speed in its elliptic orbit and its axial tilt. This event may be up to 16 minutes away from noon GMT (this discrepancy is known as the equation of time). The fictitious mean sun is the annual average of this nonuniform motion of the true Sun, necessitating the inclusion of mean in Greenwich Mean Time.
Historically the term GMT has been used with two different conventions for numbering hours. The old astronomical convention (before 1925) was to refer to noon as zero hours, whereas the civil convention during the same period was to refer to midnight as zero hours. The latter is modern astronomical and civil convention. The more specific terms UT and UTC do not share this ambiguity, always referring to midnight as zero hours.