On Sunday afternoon, October 13, 2024, I attended a wonderful concert by the Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra (SASO) that included a rousing performance of Scheherazade by the Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
Early that evening, I was the first person in the world to observe the composer’s namesake asteroid 4534 Rimskij-Korsakov passing in front of a distant star and, briefly, blocking its light. As a classical music lover, that made me very happy.
4534 Rimskij-Korsakov on 14 Oct 2024 2:23:46 UT as seen from Tucson, Arizona
using an 8-inch telescope
4534 Rimskij-Korsakov was discovered on 6 Aug 1986 by the Russian astronomer Nikolai Chernykh (1931-2004) at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory near the small settlement of Nauchnyi on the Crimean peninsula, part of Ukraine but illegally occupied by Putin’s Russian forces since 2014.
At the time of its discovery, this asteroid received its preliminary designation 1986 PV4. As is the custom, the discoverer gets to choose a name for the asteroid if they so desire, and Nikolai Chernykh decided to name his discovery after Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908). This name was approved by the IAU and published in Minor Planet Circular 23352 on 25 Apr 1994.
4534 Rimskij-Korsakov is not a large asteroid. Its average diameter is estimated to be just 9.9 miles. Had I been right on the centerline of the asteroid’s shadow, I should have seen the star disappear for about 1.2 seconds. Given that I had to use an integration time of 0.27s due the faintness of the occulted star, the 0.5-second event I recorded had only two data points in the “dip” where the 13.6 magnitude star disappeared leaving only the sky background since the asteroid’s estimated magnitude was just 17.5m. Normally, one likes to have at least three data points in the dip, but two is better than one and the event happened at exactly the predicted time.
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote a lot of great music, and he was a master of orchestration and orchestral “colors”. Here are my favorite works. If you don’t already know them, give them a listen!
- Capriccio espagnol
- Le Coq d’Or, Suite [arranged by Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936) & Maximilian Steinberg (1883-1946)]
- Russian Easter Festival Overture
- Scheherazade
- Suite from The Snow Maiden
- Symphony No. 2, “Antar”
- The Tale of Tsar Saltan, Suite