Asteroids

Today, 15 February 2013, asteroid 2012 DA14 will fly within 17,200 miles of earth. This is lower than the communications satellites that orbit 22,000 miles above the equator. The asteroid is about the size of half a football pitch and will not hit earth, and it is not expected to hit any satellites.

The best chance to see the asteroid will be after 19:26 with binoculars or telescope but will be a challenge to spot.

Talking of asteroids reminds me of a game we used to play at school back in the mid 1980’s on a BBC Microcomputer. We were supposed to be entering code to draw shapes on the screen or code like the example below to repeat text on the screen.

10 FOR X=1 TO 10
20 PRINT “HELLO WORLD”
30 NEXT X

Pretty simple stuff, but in those days when the processor speed was 2MHz, RAM was 64KB and we had up to 8 colors we were pretty impressed. Click on the image to the right and experience the classic asteroid game, it is free and no download is required. Use your cursor keys to fly your ship and the space bar to shoot.

The lowest specced machine I sell has a 2.5GHz processor, 4.0GB of RAM and 16.7 million colours and I am giving away free labour charges to the highest scorer of this classic asteroids game if they want to buy any of the computers in my range. Not looking for a new computer at the moment? Then how about 10% off labour charges for the next year.

For a chance of winning I want you to play a version of asteroids on the following link, asteroid competition, within Google Chrome and then using Google Chrome, print your best score as a pdf and email it to me by midnight on 28 February 2013.

For rules and conditions please read