By Professor Todd Brown / Contributor

Just in case you haven’t heard: it’s the end of the semester. I have a pile of lab reports and exams to grade and then have to get ready for the final exam onslaught to follow. Of course, it is much better to give than to receive but suffice to say that I am very busy and it is important to keep some inspirational words at hand during times like these. Some of us are looking for the light at the end of the tunnel but for those that are getting a little nervous as finals week (which is a Latin phrase which loosely translates as “25 percent of Your grade within a two-hour period”) approaches then may I offer my Grandpa Jac’s slogan: Take a chance, Columbus did.

However bad the upcoming days might be, they will soon be fading into the past. New challenges will be seen and, hopefully, with the skills you learned in the last few days, you will be able to overcome (or maybe simply survive) and continue to fight another day. I sit typing this out in the early hours of Thursday morning after trying to overcome the odds for an event only an astronomer could get excited about: catching an asteroid occulting a star. An occultation, for those few billion not familiar with them, is when an asteroid (as seen from someplace on the globe) seems to pass in front of a distant star. For a brief moment or two, the asteroid blocks the star’s light, effectively throwing its shadow across a thin ribbon on the earth.

For Thursday’s event, the odds were grim but the payoff would have been great. I had an approximate 5 percent chance of seeing a 10-mile wide rock called 1988 EB (ah, the romantic names in astronomy) pass in front of the star 22 Scorpio (I think Shakespeare wrote a sonnet about this star) at 2 a.m. for a brief one second.

I stood in my backyard hoping not to activate my neighbor’s security light and ruin all possibility of photographing the event. My daughter’s Disney Princesses’ chair served as a table for extra equipment. A folding chair that I had gotten as a graduate student was holding my laptop so I could see the computerized star atlas to know where to look. My camera tripod that is older than most students at Pitt-Greensburg held the video camera that was whirling away not to take pictures but to record the audio of the timing signals from Fort Collins, Colorado that I had punched up on my cellular phone and placed on “speaker” (That’s right, you can call a number and listen to a person read off the time … just in case you didn’t have any summer plans).

At this time of year, Scorpio was just barely clearing the “Pennsylvania Horizon” at 2 a.m. On the farm in Illinois, viewing it would have been with little trouble, but here I was trying to get the best view of the eastern horizon from my small yard. I had to move my telescope twice as the rotating earth kept bringing the area of interest into an evergreen tree. I couldn’t wander too far from being near this tree because it was blocking the security light on the street beyond the yard. Still, with all this, I could easily see 22 Scorpii and could only imagine a distant rock was about to come between that star and my cluttered observation post.

The voice from the timing station advanced towards “Go Time,” a name I heavily use to make activities like this seem Indiana Jones-ish. The time for the big event came and went. If the shadow passed over me, I missed it. All my pictures showed nothing but the steady trail of the star 22 Scorpii. I took a few minutes to look at Saturn that is still fairly high in the west and packed it all up. My final action was to clear the kitchen table. Before I did, I took a picture of the chaos that a 5 percent chance will lead to. My daughter’s doll (I forgot its name. Is it Pinky Splashy or Holy Mermaid?) and her hair brush shared the same space as my lenses, binoculars and my red flashlight which was stuck in the “on” position and needed the usual attention to turning it off.

It was a lot of work for a null event, but I will be back out there for all possible future events. Asteroid occultations are not an exact science. Sites on the web and journals can warn of potential events but the size of the shadow depends on the size of the asteroid and most of them are unknown, hence why these events offer valuable science. Because we are worried that we might, literally, go the way of the dinosaurs if one of these strikes the earth, we map out every asteroid that could have our name on it regarding its size and orbit. Because the shadows are so small, amateur astronomers like me who are highly mobile with their small telescopes and their pink Cinderella chairs provide a vital resource as there are always a few of us in or near the shadow.

And it is great to be vital. Even when I don’t see the actual shadow, my measurement helps confine the size of the asteroid. For my time, the only thing I lose is some sleep. Such is the case for finals week: you lose some sleep and sometimes you get the prize and other times you just, well, contribute. Good luck to you and in the days to follow.