I suppose one of the most conflicted elements of my personality is that I cannot stand watching television but I absolutely love making it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the programming I object to, but the commercials. There’s not much I find more annoying than having a paid actor yelling at me to buy a new car or hamburger when I’m trying to enjoy Star Trek re-runs.

So, understandably, some of my close friends were astounded when I admitted that I recently caved in and ordered digital cable. “But you have to understand,” I implored them. “It’s only so I can throw a broadcast party for my own show.” A pretty solid excuse right?

About 17 months ago my great friend and fellow explorer, professional meteorite hunter Steve Arnold, and I started work on a new adventure documentary, Meteorite Men, for Science Channel. I was thrilled to learn that our Director of Photography would be the brilliant Randall Love who has worked for Lucas Films, Disney, HBO, the BBC, you name it.

The Logical Lizard (above left) and his long-time expedition partner, Steve Arnold, digging space rocks. Photograph by Caroline Palmer.

In the new show we travel to rural Kansas and dig for giant meteorites, buried for thousands of years; pay a visit to the brainiacs at ASU’s fab Center for Meteorite Studies and get to play in their gazillion-dollar iBeAM lab; then skulk along to a second hunting location, so secret everybody on the crew had to sign confidentiality agreements before we’d let them film. They were very understanding about all of our shenanigans.

Meteorite Men airs tonight, June 3, on Science Channel and Science Channel HD at 6 pm in Tucson. It repeats June 4 and 5 and complete Meteorite Men showtimes are here. If the idea of mixing rocks, treasure hunting, astronomy and adventure with some dry comedy sounds watchable to you, please tune in. I won’t spoil it by telling you what we found on the expeditions, but I promise you the rocks are the real stars of the show. Fallen stars.

In "Meteorite Men" we are hoping to find pieces of the famous Brenham pallasite. Pallasites are meteorites packed with extraterrestrial peridot gemstones, as shown in this detail. Photograph by Geoffrey Notkin © Oscar E. Monnig Meteorite Gallery.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 5:17 pm and is filed under Meteorite Science, My TV Shows. Tags for this post: Geoffrey Notkin, meteorite hunter, Meteorite Men, meteorites, Oscar Monnig, Randall Love, Science Channel, Star Trek, Steve Arnold, television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.