In a few weeks ,as Earth and Mars moved closer together, a dust storm engulfed most of the red planet making it impossible to see its surface features.

It is possible that showers of comets changed the course of life on Earth.

A huge Earth approaching asteroid is discovered right before the 2018 monsoon rains settled into the American Southwest. This weather imposed break from observing provides the opportunity for asteroid hunters to make major equipment upgrades and perform routine maintenance.

A space boomerang meets its fate in a collision with the Earth about 60 miles off of the coast of Sri Lanka producing a bright, but harmless light show in the noon sky.

Most Astronomers find it hard to believe that given perhaps a trillion planets in the Milky Way alone that our Earth is the only one which hosts living organisms. It is both exciting and terrifying to realize we have no concept of what living forms may exist outside Earth in the Milky Way.

Our Moon is the nearest and most likely place for humans to colonize in the near future. It has a hostile environment where air and liquid water as we know them on Earth are not to be found. In the past astronomers hypothesized that comets are the source of water on the Earth and Moon. However, calculations by Svetsov and Shuvalov published in Planetary and Space Science indicate that when a comet impacts the Moon it is likely that 99% of its water evaporates into space and is lost. On the other hand their work indicates that asteroids have been hauling water to our Moon and depositing it in places which are very handy for future human colonists. Specifically it appears probable that 2 to 4.5 % of lunar craters are likely to contain substantial amounts of water in the form of hydrated minerals. These asteroid impact craters are a convenient source of water and solar energy for lunar bases and are likely to be the home of human lunar colonists.

Asteroid hunters have discovered a strange asteroid pair. How they came to be together and what humans would do if such a large double trouble object is heading for us remains a mystery.

During his last official observing run before retiring, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate, Rik Hill knocked two out of the park. On successive nights he discovered two new potentially hazardous asteroids 2015 TD323 and 2015 TK238. Not to worry, neither of these asteroids are a threat to Earth in the foreseeable future. However, they are large enough and can come close enough to prompt asteroid hunters to keep careful track of them.

An object is tracked in outer space, seen to explode in our atmosphere, and had a fragment of it discovered on the ground. Its analysis will help humans to prepare for and defend against a much larger object with our number on it.

The Great Galaxy in Andromeda or M31 as it is also known is one of the furtherest objects that can be seen with the unaided human eye. It is about two and a half million light years away. More than a thousand years ago the a Persian astronomer named Al-Sufi described the Great Galaxy in Andromeda as a "small cloud" in his Book of Fixed Stars. Now there are few places on planet Earth like the Cosmic Campground where one can see it with the naked eye due to inappropriate night time lighting.