Illustration by Radio 19Tip By Malia WollanHow to Spot
Asteroids‘‘Stay up all night,’’ says Gregory Leon-
ard, a research scientist at the University
of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey, who
uses a network of powerful telescopes to
fi nd and track what NASA calls near-Earth
objects, including asteroids that come
within 120 million miles of the sun. An
amateur hunter can use the same strat-
egies as a professional. Go looking in a
place without light pollution on a cloud-
less night with a steady atmosphere (if
you see stars sparkling, it’s a sign of
atmospheric turbulence). Avoid a full
moon. Leonard and his asteroid- hunter
colleagues tend to be solitary types who
don’t mind working solo night shifts and
sleeping during the day.
Under the darkest skies, you might
see Vesta, the largest asteroid, with yournaked eye. Discovering others will require
a telescope, preferably one with an aper-
ture of at least eight inches and equipped
with an astronomy- imaging camera.
Take multiple photographs of a patch
of sky over 60 minutes and then quickly
fl ip through those images one after the
other, looking for bits of light in motion.
Stars will appear stationary, but asteroids,
satellites, comets and other bits of space
debris will seem to move. Try to photo-
graph your asteroid over several nights
to collect information on its orbital path.
If you think you’ve seen an asteroid, sub-
mit your data to the Minor Planet Center,
funded by NASA and run by Harvard and
the Smithsonian. The center has received
some 340 million observations, including
more than 28,500 near-Earth object dis-
coveries, all available to the public.
On any given night, alone at a survey
telescope in the Santa Catalina Moun-
tains north of Tucson, Leonard says he
feels ‘‘a little bit like a lighthouse keeper,’’
looking for potential danger out in the
cosmic sea. Do not go hunting for chunks
of rock hurtling through space unless you
can do so without feeling overwhelmed
by fear. If you’re going to worry, do it in
a gentle way with a deep-time mind-set.
‘‘The probability of being aff ected by an
impacting asteroid in a human lifetime
is about as close to zero as one can get,’’
Leonard says. ‘‘That said, over geologic
time, the probability is 100 percent that
there’s an asteroid that’s got our number
on it.’’Brent Katz
has written for Th e
New Yorker, Th e Paris
Review, Th e Believer
and other publications.
He works as head of
development at Best
Case Studios.the toilet fl ush in the middle of the night.
A cat can learn how to do it, spurred on
by his instinct to cover up.’’
I fi rst discovered Mingus in middle
school. His music was spontaneous
yet composed. He took the listener
to the brink of cacophony but always
maintained a handle on things. Now,
years later, my fi ve-year relationship
had recently ended. I was lucky to be
employed, but I was defi nitely in the
wrong job. My life was taking another
turn toward the unknown, and I didn’t
feel I had much control over it. Mingus’s
pamphlet seemed to be fi lled with little
glimpses into his worldview and his cre-
ative process. After all, a cat, like inspira-
tion, is a mysterious force. It cannot be
commanded to sit or roll over, like a dog.
Somehow, it felt as if Mingus could see
right into the mind of the cat, to work
with the enigma.
I started buying copies for friends, as
gifts. Then I decided to test the method
myself, to see what it might teach me
about Mingus’s gift for making things
happen that shouldn’t be possible. I
haven’t had a cat since we lost Cleo, the
Abyssinian, who went crazy, my mom
claims, from licking the sticky side of
Scotch tape. So I enlisted the help of my
friend Madden, a writer and organist who
has a tuxedo cat, just like Nightlife. She
picked up a cardboard box, and the jour-
ney began.
The fi rst hiccup came swiftly. Her cat,
Reilly, didn’t want to go on torn-up news-
paper. And so, nary a week in, we reinsti-
tuted the Pine Pellet sawdust that Reilly
trusted and that Madden hoped would
not gunk up her pipes.
The box crept closer to its destination,
and Reilly began using it in the bathroom.
But three weeks in, when Madden put the
box on the toilet, Reilly wouldn’t make
the fi nal leap.
A few days before our four-week dead-
line, I texted, ‘‘Has he gone on the toilet
at all yet?’’
‘‘Not yet,’’ Madden wrote.
We had reached an impasse. What’s
more, we seemed to be confusing him.
At one point, Madden scooped Reilly up
just as he was about to do his business in
a guitar case.
About a week before the experiment
ended, the Charles Mingus Institute con-
nected me with Eric Mingus, Charles’s
son. He told me he used to watch his
father compose at the piano. ‘‘People have
this impression of him thinking about
every chord and every detail, but he just
played,’’ Eric said. ‘‘And playing would
lead to an idea.’’ It was not something he
tried to force.
Mingus also had a gift for inching
musicians out of their comfort zones.
He would often arrive at rehearsals with
unfi nished compositions, according to
the jazz scholar Krin Gabbard, then sing
the band members their parts, not allow-
ing them the crutch of sheet music. ‘‘He
could read people very well,’’ Eric said.
‘‘And that goes for cats, dogs — everyone.’’
But my conversation with Eric also
complicated the picture. For instance, he
told me that, even for his father, the Min-
gus method wasn’t foolproof. ‘‘Sometimesthe cat would miss, and there’d be cat
poop on the seat or on the fl oor.’’
The creative process can be messy.
And apparently, Mingus was ambivalent
about this messiness — about whether
his method even should work every time.
When John Cassavetes asked Mingus to
score his 1959 movie, ‘‘Shadows,’’ Mingus
agreed — but on one condition, according
to Cassavetes. Mingus told him he had all
these cats that were defecating on the fl oor
and wanted Cassavetes to send some of his
people over to clean it up. ‘‘I can’t work,’’ he
said. ‘‘They [expletive] all over my music.’’
So Cassavetes and a few others went to
Mingus’s apartment with scrubbing brush-
es. Afterward, Mingus said: ‘‘I can’t work
in this place. It’s so clean. I’ve got to wait
for the cats to [expletive].’’‘Sometimes
the cat would
miss, and there’d
be cat poop
on the seat or
on the floor.’