Admission: $5.00 Adults, free to Lake Co. K-12 students.

Additional donations in support of Lake County STEM education are encouraged. Visit our Join/Support Page and our Friends of Taylor Facebook page or phone Friends of Taylor Observatory at (707) 262-4121.

Lecture Abstract:  Objects passing near Earth from “outer space”, whether comets, asteroids or meteors, have fascinated and often frightened earth’s residents for millennia. Nearly all of these Near Earth Objects (NEO’s) originate in the solar system, but in 2017 astronomers detected, for the first time, an object that originated elsewhere in our Milky Way galaxy.  Recent observations of NEO’s are utilizing an advanced detection system in Hawaii called the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS). The mission of ATLAS is to protect or at least warn earthlings of potentially damaging impacts such as the Chelyabinsk meteor impact in Russia in 2013, which injured 1500 residents.  Had ATLAS been operational, even this relatively small 20m diameter asteroid could have been detected a day in advance of its impact in Russia. As a default of its asteroid observations, ATLAS has already made first sightings of several comets.  ATLAS is a NASA-funded resource and ATLAS data are available to the public at https://fallingstar.com