I am an amateur astronomer undertaking research on Minor Planets (Asteroids) and Near Earth Objects as part of the Binary Asteroid Photometric Survey under Principal Investigatory Dr Petr Pravec of the Astronomical Institute, Czech Republic.
I conduct both CCD Astrometric and Photometric observations, have 2 Minor Planet and 1 NEO discoveries to my name and another Minor Planet named after me (in recognition of 1000 NEO Astrometric Observations)
You can catch all the details at my website: http://users.bigpond.com/higginsdj
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I do believe that there is a great deal of extraterrestial life. I find it very difficult to believe that the elements that went into making life on earth do not exist elsewhere. Afterall we are all children of a stars lifecycle.
I think SETI is on the right track. Our first contact is likely to be the detection of non natural noise (incidental or otherwise) generated by a lifeform far (or not so far) away.
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.
