Travelers In The Night

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate David Rankin was being filmed and interviewed by the NASA 360 crew at our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona when he discovered a scary space rock moving through the constellation of Aquarius at 13 mi/s.Rest assured that asteroid hunters will carefully keep track of 2023 VS3 to make sure that its orbit does not change to make it a threat in the distant future as it passes near to Earth, Mars, and other asteroids.

The warming that is happening is having a variety of consequences. In the American midwest and northeast extreme heat, heavy rain storms, and flooding will impact agriculture, forestry, infrastructure, and air as well as water quality. In the southwest increased heat, insect outbreaks, and declining water supplies will increase the possibility of wild fires and other threats. Costal regions regions are experiencing sea level rises and storm surges which effect ports, tourism, and the fishing industry. Alaska has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the country and has witnessed sea ice retreating, glaciers receding, and permafrost melting.

A research project whoes goal is to explore if it would be possible, on short notice, to pulverize a small asteroid so that it would not enter the Earth’s atmosphere as a single object perhaps saving humanity from an very expensive sonic boom.

This is the story of the big one that got away. It illustrates the problem that there are a number of possible orbits which may fit a short arc of an object in the night sky. There may be scores of kilometer sized objects out there but 2016 NA39 is not one of them.

Matching his wife’s discovery of two comets on the same observing run seven years previously my Catalina Sky Survey team caption Carson Fuls discovered two comets on consecutive nights. They have very different origins and ultimater fates.

Imagine a telescope old enough for Senior Citizen discounts, which has traveled between mountains, and started life with a metal mirror measuring one thing at time being equipped with a camera with 100 million pixels. This is the story of the "old girl", the 60 inch Catalina Sky Survey telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona.

The NASA Psyche Spacecraft will use a multispectral imager, gamma and neutron spectrometers, and other instruments to map, measure, and characterize an unknown weird world.

During a 6 night observing run with the 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Carson Fuls discovered three new Potentially Hazardous Asteroids. They range in size from 600 to 1500 feet in diameter. Fortunately, none of them comes closer than about 14 times the Moon's distance from us.

Historically explorers in many fields of human endeavor have been granted the privilege to name their discovery. If you find a new comet and it receives enough followup observations it will carry your last name. Every year a significant number of comets and asteroids are discovered by amateur astronomers with modest equipment.Their reward is satisfaction and the right to name their discovery.

Robotic spacecraft from Earth have been traveling around the solar system for decades. What they have found is that there may be a few places on which the toughest terrestrial life forms could exist but nowhere that you could survive without a space suit. A striking by product of these missions are the photographs of our home planet that these robots have sent back to Earth.

During a six hour period three small space rocks passed through the Earth-Moon system. At discovery 2023 TO4 was in Pegasus, 2023 TD7 was in Aries , and 2023 TQ3 was in Eradanus.If 2023 TD7 had been an impactor David’s early discovery would have given some of us a chance to view a spectacular event as well as to provide a place for meteorite hunters to look for fragments. For Travelers in the Night this is Dr. Al Grauer.
 Stay Tuned.

The NASA New Horizons spacecraft obtained intriguing images and data during it's trip through the Pluto system which will keep planetary scientists busy for years to come. Now the New Horizons has it's sights set on an object, a billion miles past Pluto, which is called 2014 MU69. It is too faint for all but the most powerful telescopes which is why the Hubble Space Telescope was systematically used to discover it.

The Catalina Sky Survey searchs the sky as rapidly as possible in search of Earth approaching objects that could pose a threat to our home planet. The Vera Rubin Observatory will obtain 200,000 images per year to discover things that move or change brightness down to a very faint magnitude.

Evidence continues to mount that there is an unseen body, Planet 9, orbiting far from our Sun. Ideas of where to look for it are being guided by it's gravitational influence on objects in the distant region of our solar system called the Kuiper Belt.

New observations linked with discovery observations 10 years earlier provide a significant improvement in the precision of our knowledge of 2013 TG6’s orbital elements and thus its position on the sky well into the future.It is important for asteroid hunters to keep track of small asteroids like this one to make sure sure that their path doesn’t change to make them a threat as they pass other objects in space.

Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner, and Yann Sainty’s image of our neighboring galaxy, M31, in Andromeda won the 10,000 British pound Astronomer Photographer of the year award for 2023. Amazingly their image revealed a huge, previously unknown arc of hot doubly ionized Oxygen gas.

On a mountain top in the foothills of the Andes in northern Chile a new kind telescope, the LSST, is under construction. It's unique design allows it to image an area of the sky 40 times the size of the full moon and thus record the entire sky twice a week. In 30 seconds the LSST can spot objects 10 million times fainter than we can see with our eyes. It will discover objects which change in brightness and position to enable astronomers to study dark energy, weird stars, Earth approaching objects, and other fascinating time dependent events in the Universe.

The red planet may soon need air traffic control. In the next few years China, Europe, India, Japan, United Arab Emirates, United States, and SpaceX are all operating Martian spacecraft or planning to send robotic explorers to Mars.

NASA classifies 2023 SZ1 as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid since it is larger than 140m in diameter and on its current path can come to about 6 times the Moon’s distance from us.Fortunately on its current path 2023 SZ1 will not come any closer than 42 times the Moon’s distance from us until after 2171.

Opal, the national gemstone of Australia, is silica, the most common ingredient of sand, with a number of water molecules attached to it. On Earth Opal forms when water evaporates from a slurry of sand and water which is deposited repeatedly in a crack or fissure in a rock over a long period of time. The resulting opal may contain from 3 to 21% water by weight.Professor Hilary Downes of Birkbeck College London headed up a team which discovered Opal in a meteorite which was found in Antartica. Previous to their work the only known extra-terrestrial Opal consisted of a few crystals which were found in a meteorite from Mars.The Antarctic meteorite that Professor Downes and her team studied, EET 83309, is made up of thousands of small pieces of rocks and minerals. This space rock was created by collisions between objects from various parts of our solar system. Some of them are likely to have been carrying large amounts of water ice. The Downes team found solid evidence that the opal was formed before their sample