Jul 5, 2026 · 6 min · 7 segments
Two asteroids orbiting between Mars and Jupiter are up all night this week. One got its name because of two sad events that happened on the same date 13 years apart. Venus passes by Regulus. Jupiter…
The asteroid belt is not the densely packed region of rocks that some science fiction depictions would have you believe.
If it were, space mission managers would have to do a lot more work to make sure probes like the Voyagers, Cassini, and Pioneer 10 could get past it.
The asteroids that get closest to the Sun get about 2.2 times the distance from the Sun as Earth is.
The farthest asteroids in the asteroid belt get about 3.2 astronomical units from the Sun.
Opposition is when an object is as close as it can get to being opposite the Sun in the sky.
So when the Sun is going down, the object is rising on the opposite side of the celestial dome.
Besides having all night to look at it, astronomers also get to see the object when it's closest to Earth at about the same time as opposition, so it looks its biggest and brightest.
None of the asteroids look like anything but dots in most telescope views, but it's still fun to track them from night to night.
The asteroid belt is not the densely packed region of rocks that some science fiction depictions would have you believe.
If it were, space mission managers would have to do a lot more work to make sure probes like the Voyagers, Cassini, and Pioneer 10 could get past it.
The asteroids that get closest to the Sun get about 2.2 times the distance from the Sun as Earth is.
The farthest asteroids in the asteroid belt get about 3.2 astronomical units from the Sun.
Opposition is when an object is as close as it can get to being opposite the Sun in the sky.
So when the Sun is going down, the object is rising on the opposite side of the celestial dome.
Besides having all night to look at it, astronomers also get to see the object when it's closest to Earth at about the same time as opposition, so it looks its biggest and brightest.
None of the asteroids look like anything but dots in most telescope views, but it's still fun to track them from night to night.
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