I have always enjoyed chronicling things. When I played music professionally I was the band archivist, forever making tapes of our live performances and preserving a copy of every concert poster.

I have been presented with a unique opportunity to document something a little more unusual—the making of new television adventure series. In the coming months I will be sharing, exclusively with TucsonCitizen.com readers, an unabridged, behind-the-scenes diary about how we created my new show. I hope you find the details, mishaps, and insights to be interesting and entertaining.

Just a few days ago my expedition partner, Steve Arnold, and I received a most important phone call from Debbie Myers, President of Science Channel. A little over a year earlier she had ordered a one-hour pilot from our production company, LMNO of Encino, California. The pilot, Meteorite Men, was a success and so Debbie was calling to share exciting news with us: We were going to series.

The Meteorite Men, Steve Arnold and Geoff Notkin, on location in Kansas. Photograph by Caroline Palmer © Aerolite Meteorites

So, Steve and I will be researching, brainstorming, building and testing new equipment, traveling to strange and possibly dangerous places, engaging in some requisite goofing around and, of course, digging for space rocks.

I am more than a little bewildered by the vast amount of work that we must now accomplish but, as Steve is fond of saying: “If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.”

Come along for the ride. Adventures ahead.

Oh, and while you’re waiting, please check out these exclusive video clips from Meteorite Men, courtesy of Science Channel.

Every now and then something arrives at the Aerolite Meteorites offices that makes us stop what we’re doing and remember how lucky we are to spend our days working with visitors from outer space.

Back in the mid-1950s a farmer in Beltrami County, Minnesota is reported to have accidentally plowed up an unusual iron mass weighing 22.39 kilograms (49 lbs). The exact location remains unknown. In 1968 the mass was identified as an iron meteorite by Glenn Huss of the American Meteorite Laboratory and given the colorful name of Turtle River. Later studies showed that the iron had been artificially reheated, so perhaps a prospector or blacksmith halfheartedly tried to melt it down. We’ll never know; what exactly happened to the unique piece, and where it traveled during the intervening years has been lost to science.

A slab of the Turtle River meteorite, polished and etched to reveal its unique crystalline structure. It was once part of the heart of a planet or asteroid. Photograph by Suzanne Morrison © Aerolite Meteorites

Meteorites are typically named after the nearest town (actually the nearest post office) to their point of discovery. If no town is available, they take their name from the nearest recognizable geographic feature, hence Turtle River.

Every academic meteorite catalog includes the abbreviation TKW in its listing. That number represents the total known weight of all recovered specimens. 22 kg is a very small amount for an iron meteorite and, since no other masses were ever found, the one piece was cut up and distributed among several institutions in the United States, and then sections traveled on to Great Britain, Germany, Russia, Canada, Denmark, and to a couple of prominent private collectors. It seemed everyone wanted a piece of the enigmatic Turtle River meteorite. In fifteen years of studying meteorites I have never seen a piece, until last week when a specimen arrived here, courtesy of one of our colleagues.

What's in a number? In the pre-digital age collectors meticulously hand painted coded collection numbers onto natural history specimens. Photograph by Suzanne Morrison © Aerolite Meteorites

One side has been polished and etched with a weak solution of acid to reveal a lattice-like crystalline structure called the Widmanstatten Pattern. The feature is unique to iron meteorites and never found in earth rocks. One the reverse is a delicate hand painted number “H92.9.” This cryptic code specifically identifies the collection, specimen type and number, all in one: “H” for Huss Collection of Meteorites; “92″ for Turtle River; “9″ for the ninth example of Turtle River cataloged by Glenn Huss. A simple code can tell a lot if you know how to read it.

Iron meteorites were once part of the molten core of a planet or large asteroid, now long gone. Slow cooling in space is believed to have created their remarkable crystalline structure, made up of two different iron-nickel allows: taenite and kamacite. No two patterns are the same—much like snowflakes. Nature does like to hide some of its wonders in the strangest of places.

When I lived in New York it was always something of a production to catch one of the annual meteor showers. City lights and pollution drown out those wispy, fast-moving flashes, created when little particles of the cosmos incinerate in our atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour. Sometimes I’d travel far upstate to get away from the glaring illumination of the metro area. One year I drove out to Robert Moses State Park on Long Island, camped on the beach with friends, and gazed at meteor trails while trying to keep warm with hot toddys.

In 2002 I spent I spent a long November night, embalmed in multiple heavy wool blankets on a friend’s private lakeside dock waiting for the Leonids to appear. It was way below freezing and at around 1 am my buddies called it a night and hiked back to their cabin. I decided to tough it out, and perhaps thirty minutes later the sky exploded with a spectacular display of scores shooting stars, just for me. You have to really love stargazing to go to such lengths. These days it’s a lot easier. I just park a deck chair in my Arizona garden and mix a cocktail. Thank you Tucson Dark-Sky ordinance!

Watch the skies!

The known meteor showers take place at the same time every year, and what colorful names they have: Quadrantids, Kappa Serpentids, Lyrids, and Alpha Scorpiids, among others. The Leonids and the Perseids are the best known, as they typically produce the greatest numbers of shooting stars. The showers occur when our planet passes through trails of cometary debris. Every August we encounter a cloud of tiny fragments of ice and rock left drifting in space by Swift-Tuttle—a periodic comet that reappeared in the night sky in 1992 after an absence of 130 years.

Although the meteors we see every August originated from Comet Swift-Tuttle’s icy heart, they appear—as a result of an optical illusion—to emanate from the constellation Perseus, hence their name: the Perseids. The annual showers do not produce meteorites (any part of a meteor that survives and makes it to the earth) as the meteor-producing fragments burn up in the air. But don’t worry, somebody calls us every year to tell us they found one of the Perseids in their driveway and it’ll happen again this year, for sure.

Perseid meteors can be seen from early August well to the middle of the month. The period of maximum activity, or peak, is expected to occur during the night of August 11 and into the morning of August 12. Typically, the later it gets, the greater the number of visible meteors, with the largest number often occurring a few hours before dawn. If you are eager and dedicated enough to stay up into the wee hours, it should be possible to see one or more shooting stars per minute.

The Perseids hit our atmosphere at an extremely high speed—an incredible 130,000 miles per hour! The resulting trails are particularly bright, and sometimes vapor can be seen hanging in the air for a few seconds after a shooting star has burned up.

The best way to observe the Perseids is to find an area with dark skies and no distractions, and recline in a comfortable chair so you can view as much of the sky as possible. After midnight, the constellation of Perseus will be in the northeast for observers in Arizona. Turn off the lights, kick back, treat yourself to a favorite tipple, and watch the skies. It’s the greatest show not on this earth, it is absolutely free, and completely devoid of commercial interruption. Stellar.