Gregory Leonard is a senior research specialist at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Greg discovered Comet Leonard in January 2021. The comet was spotted, somewhat accidentally, using the Catalina Sky Survey's 1.5-meter (60-inch) telescope at the Mount Lemmon Infrared Observatory, located in the Santa Catalina Mountains in Arizona.
Gregory Leonard is an astronomer with the Catalina Sky Survey, a NASA-funded project based out of the University of Arizona, and are directed to discover and track near-Earth asteroids — the kind of asteroids whose orbits can bring them close to the Earth and potentially impact the Earth. Greg discovered Comet C/2021 A1 Leonard — also known to the world as Comet Leonard — on the morning of Jan. 3, 2021. It was a serendipitous, or incidental, discovery in one of the standard survey fields, looking for near-Earth asteroids.
