Now that's a catchy headline, isn't it?! But hey, I have just met the guy who spends his (nocturnal) life since 20 years searching the southern sky for asteroids possibly hitting earth and extinguishing all life on the planet! No joke. (Have you seen Armageddon?) This is the real-life Bruce Willis, hence. Rob is his name, actually. Very nice scotsman. And rest assured, the probability we are hit by an asteroid any time soon is pretty low.
So where I actually should have started is by telling you that Katharina (the friend of mine whose "resident bum" I am at the moment in Sydney) and I went for some walking in the Warrumbungle hills north of Sydney. Great camping among kangaroos, emus, cockatoos and goanas. Aussie bush at its finest. Beautiful landscape, rocky hills, great wildlife, very pleasant temperatures at this time of year. You might want to have a look at some pictures
here. Waking up in the morning typically meant hearing the tapping from the 'roos hopping around the tent, the deep drumming sounds the emus produce with their stomachs, and lots of noise from all sorts of birds greeting the sun rising at about 6am.
On our walk out of the hills at the end of a gorgeous little two-day hike we met Rob and his partner who straight away offered to give us a lift back to our car. During our conversation I mentioned "my" star (if you do not believe me, have a look
here or
here) - and Rob offered me to dig out some more information and even take a picture of it with his telescope. So once he sends it to me I will post it here. We went to see him in the Siding Spring Observatory, which happens to be in the Warrumbungles - the biggest
and most important observatory in Australia. He gave us a great private tour of the site and showed us the big 4m-telescope as well as his smaller telescope where he spends night after night looking for not-yet-known asteroids (see
here fore more info) and very patiently explained the details of his work to us.
The picture above shows him in his office stuffed with computers where he spends all night, on the left you can see him and Kat in front of his telescope dome. We spent the whole afternoon with him and he even offered to show us his telescope in operation during the night which we declined - preferring dinner and a good night's sleep over science...
As far as I understand we are currently quite safe from harm. But wait a second, maybe not. Here is the last line of the email I got from him just a few minutes ago:
