The asteroid that wasn’t there…

This is a series of 16 photographs of a region of the sky, taken by an amateur astronomer, on which an asteroid which should be on a collision course with the earth does not appear, proving that there is no asteroid on a collision course with the earth. On the theoretical level, proof by absence isn’t really common in photography – you’d traditionally use photography to prove that something WAS there, not that something WASN’T there.

A complete story of the incident, which almost prompted a phone call to the White House, is available here.

(images (c) Brian D. Warner / Palmer Divide Observatory)