An astronomer has captured footage of a huge asteroid 3,451 feet in diameter as it made its closest approach to Earth in almost 90 years.
Asteroid 7482 (1994 PC1) could be seen as a small white dot as it travelled towards our planet.
At 21:51 GMT on January 18, the asteroid made its closest approach to Earth since 1933, coming within 1.2 million miles of our planet.
The clip was captured by Gianluca Masi, manager of the Virtual Telescope Project, at the Bellatrix Astronomical Observatory in Italy.
A still from the footage, comes from a single, 60-second exposure. The telescope tracked the fast apparent motion of the asteroid.
This is why stars show as long trails, while the asteroid looks like a sharp dot of light in the centre of the image, marked by an arrow.
The space rock was first discovered in 1994. It orbits the Sun every 572 days.
The last known approach this close was in 1933 when it was 699,000 miles from the Earth.
Masi said: "We captured several images of the potentially hazardous asteroid (7482) 1994 PC1 while safely approaching us.
“Using all the images of the sequence, we could make the animation below, showing 1994 PC1 in motion against the stars.’”
NASA estimates the diameter of an asteroid as 3,451 feet, much larger than the tallest building on Earth, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which measures 2,722 feet.
Following its close approach on Tuesday, 7482 (1994 PC1) won’t be this close to Earth again until the year 2105.
NASA and other agencies regularly track more than 28,000 known asteroids as they orbit the Sun, and occasionally cross Earth’s orbit - none of the known asteroids is expected to collide with the Earth at any point in the near future, but there are asteroids whose orbits aren’t known.
