A large asteroid has made its closest approach to Earth in the last 100 years. In the coming days, it will be close enough that you can observe it using binoculars.
The asteroid (887) "Alinda" was first discovered by German astronomer Max Wolf at the Heidelberg Observatory on January 3, 1918. While asteroid sizes can range from the truly gigantic Ceres — a dwarf planet with a diameter of about 940 kilometers (585 miles) — to around 2 meters (6 feet), objects larger than 1 kilometer in diameter make up a small percentage of the near-Earth asteroid population. "Alinda," with an estimated diameter of 4.2 kilometers, which is roughly the width of Manhattan Island, is somewhat rare — and quite large.
This asteroid is one of the five largest asteroids that will approach Earth at a distance closer than 15 million kilometers (9.3 million miles) from now until the year 2200.