Travelers In The Night

My Catalina Sky Survey Teammate David Rankin was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Pegasus with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, AZ when he spotted a faint fuzzy object moving through a set...

27 Sep 20242min

Collect your own beautiful micro-meteorite sample. It is estimated that several hundred thousand pounds of left over particles from the formation of our solar system enters the Earth's atmosphere ever...

24 Sep 20242min

RADAR is very powerful tool since it can precisely measure an asteroid’s position and velocity as well as in some cases yield information about its size, shape, and other characteristics.

20 Sep 20242min

Protection against a comet strike is worth considering. Every year, if we are lucky, several comets can come close enough for the Sun to warm and us to see the beautiful changing dust and gas clouds a...

17 Sep 20242min

Solar storms on our home planet occur when bursts of visible, ultraviolet and other photons hit our atmosphere and/or streams of energetic particles in the solar wind interact with Earth’s magnetic fi...

13 Sep 20242min

It's a good thing this one will miss Earth. Riding the surface of the asteroid that my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Richard Kowalski recently discovered would be an incredible experience.

10 Sep 20242min

Astronomers measure an asteroid’s position  on the sky using a two dimensional system similar to the latitude and longitude coordinates we obtain with our GPS.  For the vast majority of asteroids, we ...

6 Sep 20242min

When asteroid hunters follow an object in the night sky for a few hours or a couple of days they are only able to observe a snippet or tracklet of the object's hundreds to thousands of days long path ...

3 Sep 20242min