Travelers In The Night

Greg's comet comes into our neighborhood once per human lifetime and spends most of it's time in the lonely space high above or far below the rest of the members of our solar system.

Long Winter nights with good seeing, from start to finish, are those on which the asteroid hunter makes new discoveries while being treated to views of millions of stars, gas clouds, and galaxies which inspire a child like sense of wonder.

The hypothesis that Oumuamua, the interstellar space rock, is an alien probe is pretty farfetched, however, how it came to have it's current shape is almost equally hard to imagine.

A large asteroid barely missies being classified by NASA as potentially hazardous. It may be a good candidate for asteroid miners.

Aten asteroids can make close approaches to Earth. They are difficult to discover because they spend most of their time inside our orbit with their illuminated side facing away from us.

Intriguing features which change with the Martian seasons mimic flows of liquid water on the Earth's surface.

The first alien object to observed visiting our solar system arrives from truly deep space and leaves us with the mystery of what it is and how it got that way.

A thousand meteors brighter than the planet Venus enter the Earth's atmosphere every day. The record of one of them on your dash cam can reveal where it came from and where to find pieces of it on the ground.

Earth like planets are being discovered circling the most common type of star in our neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy.

A small asteroid soars into the lonely space high above and below the plane of our solar system.

A three football field sized asteroid survives on a harrowing path around our Sun.

The impact of a 1,200 foot diameter asteroid would produce devastating earth quakes and wind blasts over many square miles on the Earth's surface.

To cut the mission time to Mars, the risks, and the mass of supplies required for such a prolonged space mission NASA is looking at alternative means of rocket propulsion.

A tiny space rock narrowly missed the Earth.

My team the Catalina Sky Survey set a new single month record by discovering 211 Earth approaching objects in October of 2017. Fortunately none of them are on a collision course with planet Earth, however, they give us a good idea of what whizzes by us every month.

Perhaps the reason that we have not detected alien civilizations on distant worlds is because they exist in oceans covered by miles of radiation absorbing ice and rocks.

A rock from another solar system is likely to have streaked by Earth before heading back into interstellar space.

On it's gravitational leash, Earth's pet space rock, 2016 HO3, accompanies us at a distance of between 38 and 100 times the Moon's distance from Earth as we both travel about the Sun.

The plants that Mars explorers take with them will provide a source of fresh fruits and vegetables , fresh air to breathe, and perhaps a psychological benefit that is crucial to the success of their mission.

In less than 24 hours, while observing with the Catalina Sky Survey's 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona , I discovered two 25 foot diameter space rocks that theoretically can pass less than a quarter of the Moon's distance from us.