Today

Today, in my part of Michigan, six inches of new snow fell and I had to go outside twice on my tractor to blow the driveway clean.  Now it's drifted over again.

Today there are Russian troops gathering near the eastern Ukrainian border, and an American general said that the U.S. is ready to enter the Ukraine with military force.

Today the United State government went further into debt at the rate of one billion dollars per hour, when measured with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles -- which they do not use.

Today a Facebook executive was in the news because she has recruited a number of celebrities in her campaign to ban the word "bossy" as applied to girls and women.

Today a Chinese satellite may have spotted pieces of a Malaysian jetliner that disappeared four days ago, with two hundred and thirty-nine people on board.

Today Edward Snowden, recently of the NSA, said that he had no regrets about revealing the fact that the US government has engaged in massive spying upon its own citizens, to better protect their freedoms.  Senator Dianne Feinstein, who recently defended the government's right to collect such data, expressed indignation at discovering that it has been spying on her, too.

Today a building in Harlem, on Manhattan Island, exploded because of a gas leak, killing between three and twelve people, injuring many others, and causing the collapse of two nearby building.

Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average was almost unchanged at 16,340 points.  The donut company Krispy Kreme rose sharply in after-hours trading.  More than 90% of all trades were executed by high-frequency trading computers.  The average period of ownership for a given share of stock dropped to less than 1 second.

And today, somewhere in the two hundred thousand trillion trillion cubic miles that constitute our solar system, there is a rock drifting in space that will intersect our orbit, enter our atmosphere, and strike our planet sometime between next week and a million years from now. 

Well, of course there's more than one.  Those like the one I saw long ago, or like the one that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Siberia early last year -- those are exciting enough.  But the one that worries me is about five miles across, will strike with the force of about 40 teratons of TNT, will raise a tsunami about 100 feet high that strikes the entire pacific rim about 8 hours after impact, and will end up killing somewhere between one half and two-thirds of the human population with prompt plus delayed effects in the two or three years after impact.  Assuming the wave doesn't bust open any nuclear plants.  Oops.

I like galaxies, and planets, and nebulae, and all those things.  I really like all the stuff that people look at through telescopes.  But myself, what I want to find is that rock.  As far in advance as possible.

In this blog, I will be talking about some ideas -- that I think might be original -- for finding asteroids with telescopes.  I don't want to do it the way we used to do with film, or the way I see people describing on the internet (which is pretty much the same as what we used to do with film).

I want to be able to find the tiniest little streak of an asteroid, so dim that it's right down in the background noise, so dim that an astronomer who knows what he's doing will tell me "You can't detect an object of that brightness with an instrument of that size."

Doesn't that sound like fun?