Dr. Peter Jenniskens is an expert on meteor showers and author of Meteor Showers and their Parent Comets, a 790 page book containing predictions on what unusual meteor showers to expect in the next 50 years.

Peter is best known for his recovery of fragments of asteroid 2008 TC3 in the Nubian Desert of northern Sudan with Sudanese astronomer Muawia Shaddad and his students from the University of Khartoum. This was the first time that an asteroid was spotted in space, observed by telescopes, then samples retrieved for study. Peter currently runs the NASA sponsored Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance (CAMS) project in northern California, which aims to confirm some of the 300+ meteor showers in the IAU Working List that need confirmation.

In this talk, Dr. Peter explains why you don’t have to go to far places to find asteroids as they could be sitting in your backyard!

Enjoy:

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Asteroid Day, June 30th 2015
California Academy of Sciences
San Francisco, California