About the talk:

Doctor by day, asteroid hunter by night, Michał Żołnowski built the Rantiga Osservatorio in 2011, a remote controlled observatory in an ancient farmhouse in a remote Italian mountain village. Together with his partner Kraków student Michał Kusiak, every night they search the skies for asteroids and comets. By combining public data from some of the world's biggest space programmes and their own algorithm, Rantiga Osservatorio is now competing with the world's largest professional observatories, and so far it has identified over 200 asteroids. Michał will talk about how the observatory was created, about how even today a team of amateurs can compete with massive public institutions and why Italian cows could affect the fate of human civilisation.

Recorded during: TEDxKraków 2013

About the speaker:

Doctor by day, asteroid hunter by night – in 2011, Michał Żołnowski built Rantiga Osservatorio, a remote controlled observatory in an ancient farmhouse in a remote Italian mountain village. So every night, together with his partner in the project Michał Kusiak, they now search the sky for asteroids and comets. By combining public data and their own clever algorithm Rantiga Osservatorio is now competing with the world’s largest professional observatories. Results? So far Rantiga Osservatorio has identified over 200 asteroids.

In his talk at TEDxKraków, Michał will talk about how the observatory was created, how a team of amateurs can compete with massive public instutions and why Italian cows could affect the fate of human civilisation.