Dr. Peter Jenniskens is an astronomer with the SETI Institute in Mountain View. His research is in natural and artificial meteors, and meteor showers.  He is known for organizing airborne observing campaigns out of NASA Ames Research Center to study meteor showers, as well as for the re-entry of the Stardust Sample Return Capsule.

He will talk about how we have gradually learned, only in the last ten years, how to anticipate meteor storms and outbursts. He will also talk about minor meteor showers, about the different types of parent bodies responsible for meteor showers, and how meteor showers play a role in the origin of life on Earth and our defense against Earth impactors.

Dr. Jenniskens started out as an amateur astronomer with the Dutch Meteor Society. He has since engaged amateur astronomers in the Bay Area in exciting meteor shower observing campaigns, most recently to observe the unusual outburst of Aurigid meteors on September 1, 2007, and the Quadrantid shower on January 3, 2008.  He will share with us the results from those observations.

Dr. Jenniskens is author of "Meteor Showers and their Parent Comets",  a unique handbook for astronomers interested in observing meteor storms and outbursts, by Cambridge University Press. You can also ask him what name to give to the new meteor shower you just discovered, because he is also the chair of the International Astronomical Union's Task Group on Meteor Shower Nomenclature!