Travelers In The Night

The natural night sky is alive with its own lights. In addition to celestial sources often there is natural night sky airglow powered by space weather from above and/or tropospheric activity from below. It is not the Aurora Borealis. Amazing images show green airglow waves which are brighter than the Milky Way.The theory behind these beautiful images remains a mystery

The Moon is the Earth's long time dancing partner. This unequal pair revolve about a teeter totter type balance point which in turn orbits the Sun every 365 and a quarter days. A small asteroid has become a third partner in the Earth-Moon dance.

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Josh Hogan was asteroid hunting in the constellation Sextans with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona when he discovered the largest asteroid in nearly a decade

A tough rocky asteroid makes close approaches to the Sun.

An object like 2023 MN5 impacts Earth once every 90,000 years or so creating a crater 5 miles in diameter an 1800 feet deep in sedimentary rock. 50 miles from the impact of such an object observers would feel the effects of a 7.1 Richter scale Earth. Rest assured that asteroid hunters will continue to track 2023 MN5 as it passes near Earth and Jupiter to make sure that its orbit does not change to make it a threat to humanity.

Students and teachers are doing real science by measuring the shadows cast by distant objects in our solar system.For years humans knew Pluto, the first Trans-Neptunian object to be discovered, only as a moving point of light in the night sky. It wasn't until 58 years after it's discovery that astronomers were able to observe a star as Pluto passed in front of it. These data gave an accurate diameter and also proved that Pluto has an atmosphere. There are estimated to be 100,000 Trans-Neptunian bodies larger than 60 miles or so in diameter. They have stories to tell about the beginning of the solar system. Additionally, sometimes, a passing star changes one of their orbits sending it into the inner solar system and perhaps near to us.

In less than two hours my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Allesandra Serrano discovered two small fast moving space rocks. Both of them passed through the Earth-Moon system unimpeded. Other space rocks are not so lucky.

The source of the Geminid Meteor shower each December is a strange little asteroid.

Carson Fuls, one of my Catalina Sky Survey teammates, is leading the effort that will allow you to join our NASA funded adventure in asteroid hunting and discovery. You will learn how to scan our nightly archival images to discover new small solar system worlds.Happy asteroid hunting.

Recently Dr. Michael Gillon of the University of Liege in Belgium and a team of astronomers hypothesized since that approximately 2/3 of the stars in our neighborhood are red dwarf stars some of them might host inhabitable planets. To test this idea the researchers began to carefully monitor some nearby red dwarfs with a robotic telescope in Chile to see if any of them the have regular dips in brightness which indicate the presence of planets orbiting them.This team of astronomers were delighted when a faint star in an infrared star catalogue showed regular dips in brightness indicating the presence of three planets. Followup observations by the European Southern Observatories' 8 meter telescope in Chile confirmed the presence of three Earth sized planets orbiting a star now known as TRAPPIST-1. This extremely faint red star is only slightly larger than the planet Jupiter and puts out 0.05% of the energy of our Sun. Two of its Earth sized planets orbit every 1.5 and 2.4 days receiving four and two times the r

Hungarian astronomer and geography teacher Krisztián Sárneczky was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Lynx with 0.6m (24 inch) telescope at the Piszkéstető station in the Mátra Mountains when an unknown object streaked through a set of his images. It is the 7th such object to be tracked in outer space and then observed to enter our atmosphere. A tiny asteroid the size of 2023 CX1 enters the Earth’s atmosphere about once a month and gives asteroid hunters a chance to practice for a big one.

About 20 years ago Dr. Elizabeth Austin began to investigate Polar Vortex winds during the long winter nights near the poles. One of its components, the stratospheric polar night jet, can create 300 mph winds which in turn can project atmospheric mountain waves as high as 130,000 feet into the stratosphere.The Airbus Perlan II is an engineless glider designed to surf stratospheric mountain waves in our atmosphere to the edge of space. Cruising at 400 mph at an altitude of 90,000 feet this glider with a wing span of 85 feet will become the highest level flying winged vehicle in history and will be able to travel above 98% of the Earth's atmosphere. The cabin of Perlan II is pressurized and is occupied by a crew of two who make their high altitude flights from a base in Argentina.The Perlan II will carry a package of scientific instruments which will enable it to study the atmosphere without the presence of a polluting engine to bias the measurements. The results will provide important information about our atm

An extremely wide field of view camera, the Zwicky Transient Facility, operated by Caltech on Palomar Mountain in California is able to take images of the entire northern sky every couple of days. This capability has enabled to astronomers to find nearly 8,000, Type IA supernova. A recent discovery SN Zwicky is unique.

During the course of a single night our telescopes can find more than 10,000 moving objects. Fortunately our software geniuses are able to sort through this pile to allow us to focus on unknown objects which require additional observations. Most of the time asteroid hunters are able to decide if an unknown moving object is an Earth approaching asteroid by observing it for a few nights to determine it's path around the Sun. However, recently my Catalina Sky Survey teammates Alex Gibbs, Greg Leonard, Carson Fuls, and Richard Kowalski as well as observers in Hawaii, New Mexico, Australia, and Kitt Peak in Arizona had to follow an unknown object for nearly a month to determine its nature.The new object they discovered is now called 2016 EJ203. It is about 3000 feet in diameter and takes 504 years to orbit the Sun on a path which goes from between Mars and Jupiter out to 3 times Pluto's distance from the Sun. In 2016 humans were able to spot 2016 EJ203 during the two weeks every 500 years that it is bright enough

Project Breakthrough Listen is spending $100 million over 10 years so that radio telescopes can search for signals which may indicate extraterrestrial intelligence.In a recent article in the Astronomical Journal a team of astronomers published a paper entitled “A 4–8 GHz Galactic Center Search for Periodic Technosignatures”. The teams first effort yielded a null result, however, they plan to continue to search for rotating beacons which could be used by extraterrestrials to communicate with far flung regions of the Milky Way.

Recently Dr. Adam Frank of the University of Rochester and Dr Woodruff Sullivan of the University of Washington published a paper in which they addressed the question "What are the odds that humans are the only technological species that has ever arisen in a given volume of space"? Humans continue to look into the night sky and wonder what is out there. The immense distances and the uncertain lifetime of an advanced civilization make it seem unlikely that we will discover intelligent beings outside of Earth. However, I remain hopeful of one day waking to the news that we have received signals from thinking beings which live elsewhere in the Milky Way.

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate David Rankin was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Cancer with our Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona when he discovered a potentially hazardous asteroid, 2023 KM5.Rest assured there is no way, on its current path, that 2023 KM5 will impact the Earth in the foreseeable future, however, asteroid hunters will continue to track it to make sure its orbit does not change to make it a threat.

Most asteroids that we observe have been baked by the Sun for billions of years. As a result, any ices or frozen gases that they may have once possessed are long gone. Comets on the other hand have spent so much time far from the Sun that they still contain volatile materials. As a typical comet approaches the Sun, the frozen gases and ices it contains evaporate to form a beautiful coma and a long tail.

In 2023 the James Webb Space Telescope spotted a geyser of water vapor extending more than 80% of the Earth’s diameter erupting from Saturn’s moon Enceladus. If life does exist in the salty ocean of Enceladus shielded from the rest of the Universe by a thick layer of ice and rock its nature remains a mystery.

More than 25 years ago Voyager 1 took a picture of the Earth from beyond Pluto's orbit. This image shows our home planet to be an isolated tiny pale blue dot floating in the vastness of space.