How to watch skyscraper-size asteroid zoom past Earth on livestream

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A very large asteroid, called 2025 FA22, will pass relatively close to Earth this week, and you can view the event online.

A large asteroid, between 427 and 951 feet wide, will fly past Earth early on Thursday, September 18th. It will come within about 520,000 miles – roughly twice the distance to the moon – and is traveling at around 24,000 miles per hour.

So, I was reading about this asteroid, 2025 FA22, that they spotted back in March using a telescope in Hawaii. At first, some calculations made it seem like there was a tiny chance it could hit Earth way back in 2089, which freaked some people out! It even made it onto a list the European Space Agency keeps of potentially dangerous space rocks. But thankfully, they’ve done more observing since then and now they’re saying it’s totally not a threat. They took it off the list in May, so we’re good!

How to watch the asteroid

You can watch the asteroid flyby live online thanks to the Virtual Telescope Project. They’ll be using a telescope in Italy to broadcast the event for free, starting around 11 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, September 17th.

If you have a telescope or binoculars, you might be able to see the asteroid. At its brightest, it will be around magnitude 13, which means a decent backyard telescope or binoculars should be able to pick it up. Websites like TheSkyLive.com can help you find it in the sky.

Scientists will use NASA’s Goldstone radar telescope in California, along with other observatories around the globe, to carefully track the asteroid and learn more about its size and shape.

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2025-09-17 19:48