Travelers In The Night

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

Hycean Worlds, with masses between Earth and Neptune which have thin hydrogen rich atmospheres above a liquid water ocean may be very common in our neighborhood of the Milky Way. They could be an abode of life.

If you woke up tomorrow with gamma ray eyes things would look very different. Geology would come to life as you peered into the Earth and became aware of the various minerals it contains. Gamma rays coming from stars, supernovae, pulsars, and black holes would create a fog extending over all of the sky.

Given the effects of climate change today who can predict what planet Earth will be like when C/2023 P1(Nishimura) comes back near our home planet in approximately 2455 AD.

Before you pack your bags for a trip to Mars you will want to check out the weather data that NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover has recorded over the past two Martian years.There is no getting around the fact that you will need a space suit and long woolies to survive on Mars.

In 2023 T. Maroti of the Capricornus Observatory, Csokako, Hungary discovered two Earth approaching asteroids which were passing through the night sky unnoticed by other observers. His equipment is an 11 inch telescope, electronic camera, and computer.

The more we learn about 322P/SOHO the stranger it becomes.

The Catalina Sky Survey and the Korean teams of asteroid hunters will discover and track Earth approaching objects making the residents of our home planet safer

Should humans hide from ET or should ET hide from us?

Bright fireball meteors sometimes rain pieces of themselves onto the ground for meteorite hunters to discover.

Collisions between planets, planetesimals, asteroids, and comets have produced the place where we live and breathe.Today scientists are replacing myths with solid evidence that violent impacts between planets, planetesimals, asteroids, and comets are very common in our galaxy. They play a vital role in the formation of solar systems which contain habitable planets.