Travelers In The Night

389E-426-Rose Rules Again Recently my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Rose Matheny discovered 8 new Earth approaching object candidates on a single night with our Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona. One of them, 2017 YO is a mile and a half diameter, main belt asteroid, while the other 7 are interesting Earth approaching objects. Another one of Rose's single night discoveries is 2017 YM1. When Rose first spotted it this space rock was moving rapidly north, at 6.9 miles per second, away from the Earth in the constellation of Ursae Major. About 5 days earlier it had passed near both the Earth and Our Moon at which time it was too far south to be seen from Arizona. This space rock is about 92 feet in diameter, orbits the Sun once every 2.25 years, and can come to less than a tenth of the Moon's distance from us. 2017 YM1 is about 1.5 times larger than the Chelyabinsk (Shell ya binsk) meteor which in 2013 broke many thousands of windows and injured 1,200 people. According to Perdue University's impact calculator, a space rock like 2017 YM1 enters the Earth's atmosphere once every hundred years or so with an energy of 250 kilotons of TNT, explodes into a cloud of fragments at about 73,000 feet, rains pieces onto the ground, and produces a sonic boom that would get your attention as it breaks a lot of windows. Asteroid hunter's goal is to discover any such impactor days before it enters the Earth's atmosphere so that people can be warned to stay away from doors and windows. For Travelers in the Night this is Dr. Al Grauer.

© 2026 A. D. Grauer

Asteroids could provide a solution for the serious problem of how to protect astronauts from harmful solar and cosmic radiation during long duration space flights and thus eliminate the need for the spacecraft itself to have heavy shielding material. The idea is for the spacecraft to spend most of the journey inside the asteroid.

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard was searching for Earth approaching objects with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona when he discovered an interesting new comet moving through the constellation of Leo. After Greg posted his discovery observations on the Minor Planet Center's Near Earth Confirmation Page it was observed over the next 3 weeks by 10 different observatories around the world. These data were used to calculate the details of the new object's 51 year path around the Sun and give it the name Comet C/2017 W2 (Leonard) . Greg's newly discovered comet's orbital plane is almost at a right angle to paths of the planets and most of the asteroids so that it spends most of it's time in the lonely space high above or far below the rest of the members of our solar system. Riding with Comet C/2017 W2 (Leonard) would bring a space traveler into the inner solar system about once per human lifetime. Greg's comet receives only mild solar heating since at it's closest it is about 3 times further from the Sun than we are making it unlikely to ever be bright for human observers. At it's furthest from the Sun, Comet Leonard is in a very cold region, receives less than 1% solar energy than we do, and and likely to have a surface temperature of about -300 degrees Fahrenheit. Greg's comet is likely to remain as it is for eons since it spends so much of it's time far from the Sun and the gravitational tugs of most of the rest of the members of our solar system.
© 2026. A. D. Grauer

Looking into a star filled sky at a place like the Cosmic Campground International Dark Sky Sanctuary in New Mexico inspires a person to wonder if our home planet is unique in the Universe. To begin to answer this question, NASA launched the small satellite Pandora on January 11, 2026 . It is on at least a one year long mission to study the chemical composition of more than 20 planets orbiting nearby stars in the Milky Way.The Pandora satellite’s results will hopefully include a list of potentially habitable planets to be observed the James Webb Space Telescope and other observatories in the search for life elsewhere in the Universe.

Winter nights can be exhausting, productive, as well as sometimes frustrating for asteroid hunters. At the Sixty Inch Telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona, near winter solstice, the night's observing starts at 6:30 PM and continues till after 6 AM which combined with start up and end tasks makes the asteroid hunter's work "day" more than 13 hours long. On such a recent long winter work night, my Catalina Sky Survey Teammate, Carson Fuls discovered an impressing total of 18 new Earth approaching objects. On the other hand on the next 3 night shift, I was treated to one night which was clear followed by two nights which were dominated by the first big snow storm of the season. The best nights are clear, cold, and calm with asteroid images which are small intense points of light. Such a night is said to have good seeing. Nights which are clear but have bad seeing with fuzzy star and asteroid images due to atmospheric turbulence and high winds makes the discovery of faint objects virtually impossible. High winds can and do shake the telescope producing double images of every object. Nights which consist of sporadic clear holes in the clouds also yield few new discoveries. Fishing what we call "sucker holes" in the clouds is very frustrating since it is hard to verify a new discovery under such conditions. Then there are the nights which are perfectly clear but we have to keep the dome closed because of the snow on it. Then there are those nights which are clear with good seeing from start to finish 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. For Travelers in the Night this is Dr. Al Grauer.
© 2026 A. D. Grauer