This is pretty cool.  Today a large near-Earth object known as Asteroid Florence makes its closest pass to Earth in more than 600 years.

Don’t worry, Florence is less an immediate threat than Harvey (we do have a tendency to anthropomorphize things coming flying at us).  It (she?) will come within 4.4 million miles (7 million kilometres) of our planet.  No worries, that is 18 times farther away than our moon so it won’t ruffle Donald’s hair as it passes by.  It is the closest it has come since 1890 and the next closer call will be in the year 2500.  I’ve put that event in my iPhone calendar (should be on iOS version 492.2 by then).

Of course we’ve only known about Asteroid Florence since 1981 when it was discovered and named by Schelter “Bobby” Bus.  He named it after the founder of modern nursing (that was Florence Henderson right?  At least that is what a little Nightingale told me).  What astounds me is that Earth is whizzing around the Sun, the solar system is whizzing through the galaxy and our galaxy is whizzing amongst many other galaxies and someone can figure out when and where this 2.7 mile (4.4 km) wide piece of rock will be at any one moment.  Must be one heck of an Excel spreadsheet.

As always you can find more on http://www.walterthinnes.com and on Twitter @walterthinnes

*all credit for today to Twitter Master @pourmecoffee (you should follow) for referring to a Cosmos Magazine article regarding this event

NEXT WEEK: Labor Day, Blog Milestone, Updating your resumé and more…..