Travelers In The Night Albert D. Grauer

A pair of comets visiting our neighborhood are discovered in a matter of 4 days.
One of the perks of being an asteroid hunter is having a comet named for you. To do this you must be the first to discover it as a moving point of light in the night sky and at the same time recognize that it is a comet by observing the coma and tail which are names for the clouds of gas and dust that surrounds it. After being on the lookout for a comet for sometime, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Rose Matheny discovered two of them within a 4 day period of time. Both of them C/2016 T1 (Matheny) and C/2016 T2 (Matheny) are likely to be first time visitors to the inner solar system. These two comets have quite different paths which are both inclined at large angles to the paths of the planets about the Sun. In addition, both of them are traveling at very close to the escape velocity from our solar system and have uncertain orbital periods around the Sun which are likely to be thousands of times the age of the Universe.

Life on Earth appears to have formed in our oceans. Scientists are thus on the hunt for other worlds which have oceans of liquid water and thus potentially could be the home of fellow living creatures.

Using a small telescope or a set of binoculars you can see Europa for yourself as a small moving point of light circling the giant planet Jupiter. More than 400 years after Galileo Galilei discovered this seemingly small dead world the Hubble Space Telescope spotted geysers erupting from its south polar regions. Recently, over a 15 month period, the Hubble was able to observe 10 transits of Europa across the face of Jupiter. On three such occasions plumes were seen to be erupting from this small moon.

It is essential that asteroid hunters keep track of potentially dangerous asteroids to make sure that their orbits haven’t changed as they encounter other objects in space to make them a threat to our home planet.

The Rosetta Spacecraft left planet Earth in 2004. During its twelve year lifetime this robotic emissary traveled 5 billion miles on 6 trips around the Sun, flew by Earth three times, visited Mars, and cruised by two asteroids. Rosetta needed to take such a long path to use the gravity of Earth and Mars to accelerate it to a speed which would allow it to rendezvous with a comet. Upon arrival, Rosetta successfully spent two years studying the comet at close range and sent a probe to it's surface. It's life ended when its human masters put it on a collision course with Comet 67P's nucleus.

On the 3rd of March 2024 while asteroid hunting with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon , Arizona my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Kacper Wierzchos discovered a comet moving through the constellation of Draco.Since we don’t know Kacper’s comet’s chemical composition it is impossible to accurately predict how. bright it will be as it crosses the  Earth’s orbit December 12, 2025, rounds the sun January 20, 2026, and crosses our orbit again February 27, 2026.