How many Mongolians speak German? Plus asteroid 2005 YU55 again, and a bit on Portuguese.

I've been watching every source I can find for new images since the 2005 YU55 asteroid flyby about six hours ago, and still nothing since the observations taken and released yesterday when it was about 1.3 million km away, four times farther away than today' s closest approach. I assume we will see those in a few hours (tomorrow in North America). In the meantime now that the asteroid is moving away from the sun from our perspective there are a lot of observatories observing it as it flies away, including the Keck Observatory right now. We should see some of these videos soon as well.

Here's one video showing it flying by:



JPL also released a quick movie of a few images put together from yesterday's observations:



In other news, here is an interview by Pravda about promoting Portuguese in Russia and about the Portuguese orthographic accord.

An article here in French states that there are some 30,000 Mongolians that speak German, quite a high number for a country of its population (under 3 million) and location. The reason? Former close ties with the DDR, or East Germany.