Category: Main Show

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The Discussion: This month Jeni has a PhD offer that’s getting us all excited, Paul’s been clocking up the miles to teach science and astronomy to schools and Ralph’s just excited because he’s got a new telescope.

Mat & Phil from Project Helium Tears join us again on the day they launched their 2nd Star Wars themed balloon to the edge of space.

The News: We start the news with last month’s total solar eclipse seen from parts of Asia before explaining the research that suggests an ancient cataclysm caused Mars crust & mantle to shift. Then we discuss the launch of ESA’s Exomars part 1. And we finish with a round-up of the news from NASA’s Insight mission, the 1st analysis of the atmosphere of a super earth exoplanet atmosphere and the latest SpaceX attempt to bring down the cost of commercial spaceflight.

The Interview: For the interview this month we welcome Apollo 12 lunar module pilot and Skylab 2 commander Alan Bean. We discuss:

• 44 years of humans staying in Low Earth Orbit
• Nearly missing out on walking on the moon due to lightning
• Saving the Apollo 12 mission
• The colourful crew of Apollo 12
• Finding organic matter in lunar orbit
• Competing with smarter astronauts – and not being Clint Eastwood!
• A moonwalker’s impressions of the moon
• The feeling of the moon’s surface underfoot

And the full hour long interview with Alan Bean will be released in May 2016.

Woobusters: Continuing our quest to debunk the myths and conspiracy theories that persist in every dark corner of the news and the internet. This month’s topic, picked at random from the Big Hat of Woo, is The Dead Cosmonauts conspiracy.

Q&A: Listeners’ questions via email, Facebook & Twitter take us on a journey into the astronomy issues that have always plagued our understanding or stretched our credulity. This month we tackle:

When will the Theory of General Relativity become Law? Brad Bell from Texas, United States

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The Discussion: We bid a sad farewell to Apollo pioneer Edgar Mitchell who spent 33 hours on the lunar surface in 1971 on the Apollo 14 mission, celebrate the detection of gravitational waves and Paul regales us with his tales of clear skies for some long awaited eyepiece time.

The News: This month the news is dominated by the death of Apollo 14’s Edgar Mitchell. We bring you the highs of collecting moon rocks and the lows of a retirement spent promoting pseudoscience. We follow this up with more information on the detection by LIGO of the last confirmed prediction of Einstein’s General Relativity, gravitational waves, and what this means for the future of astronomy. And we finish off with the observation by the European Southern Observatory of a flying saucer shaped forming planetary system.

Woobusters: This month we don the tin foil hat of woo to debunk the Nibiru conspiracy theory. The planet predicted to crash into Earth and destroy all life without a shred of evidence to its name!

The Interview: We welcome Canadian Soyuz, Shuttle and Space Station astronaut Chris Hadfield into the chair this month to discuss:

The best and worst things about being in space

The most difficult thing to adjust to in space

What is it about test pilots that lends itself to becoming an astronaut

What was the best aircraft to fly

Is the space station a distraction from deep space missions

What’s the next space destination after the Space Station

What will Chris Hadfield do in retirement

Do you wish you’d been a musician

As a positive person, how do you face the bad things in life

Q&A: Listeners’ questions via email, Facebook & Twitter take us on a journey into the astronomy issues that have always plagued our understanding or stretched our credulity.

If nothing can escape from a black hole, not even light, why in the news today is there talk of ‘jets’ of energy being released by one? And, if nothing can travel faster than light, how can the universe be expanding in excess of this speed and still be accelerating? Jason Paul Smith via Facebook

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The Discussion: As we lament the passing of some great people we remember how lucky we are to live in an age of great discovery. We discuss British astronaut Tim Peake’s spacewalk with American Tim Kopra outside the International Space Station and take a look back at the annual festival of TV astronomy StargazingLIVE.

The News: There’s a packed news section in this month’s show as we discuss:

Have astronomers discovered another planet in our solar system?

LIGO’s possible detection of gravitational waves

Does an irregular star host evidence for alien life?

A possible explanation for the ‘Wow signal’

The most powerful supernova ever detected

Poor Philae gives up the ghost

Attempting to photograph a black hole

The Interview: This month Jen bags herself an astronaut. While celebrating the launch of Tim Peake, Jen grabs an interview with Spanish/ESA astronaut Pedro Duque: a veteran of two space missions having flown the Shuttle, Soyuz and the International Space Station.

WooBusters: With a long back catalogue to call upon to understand objects and concepts in astronomy, Paul calls it a day on his 5 Minute Concept. In its place comes WooBusters! Send in your suggestions for conspiracy theories, bonkers ideas and general pseudoscientific nonsense and we’ll add them to Paul’s Big Hat of Woo.

This month we kick off WooBusters with a debunking of alien abductions.

Q&A: Listeners’ questions via email, Facebook & Twitter take us on a journey into the astronomy issues that have always plagued our understanding or stretched our credulity.

If Mars’ gravity is too weak to hold onto its atmosphere, how did it ever get one? Andrew Osbourne from the UK via email

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The Discussion:
In our first invasion of 2016 we discuss Paul’s work promoting British astronaut Tim Peake’s stay on the International Space Station and his visit to Parliament; Jen’s ongoing work in General Relativity and black holes; and John tells us about his trip to visit the Sutherland Astronomical Society in Perth, Australia.

The News:
This month we return to NASA’s Dawn spacecraft at Ceres where we might just have the answer to those intriguing white spots on the dwarf planet. Then we discuss the findings that put to bed the puzzle about why gas giant exoplanets don’t seem to have the right amount of water in their atmospheres. And we finish January’s news with a wandering Kuiper Belt object snapped by NASA’s New Horizon’s spacecraft.

The 5 Minute Concept:
We conclude our series of back to basics 5 Minute Concepts with a look at the last essential items in the amateur astronomers toolkit – eyepieces. Whay are they, whey do we need them, how to get the most from them and how to get the balance between cheap stock eyepieces and expensive behemoths.

The Interview:
This month we continue to honour 100 years of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity as Jen talks to Professor Mark Hannam, Dr Patrick Sutton and Dr Stephen Fairhurst from Cardiff University’s School of Physics and Astronomy.

Q&A:
Listeners’ questions via email, Facebook & Twitter take us on a journey into the astronomy issues that have always plagued our understanding or stretched our credulity:

How will the decision in Hawaii to stop the construction of the Thirty Metre Telescope affect progress in commissioning bigger & bigger Earth-based scopes? Eric Emms from London, England via Twitter

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The Discussion: In this Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy contrived episode we look back over the movie The Martian, meeting Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, we gloss over the Bayesian statistics in Jen’s data analysis work and hear about a mathematics-based nightmare that’s been keeping Jen awake but should have mathematicians rolling in the aisles!

The News: This month we revisit that alien megastructure around a distant star with an unusual light curve and reveal what alien signatures SETI have discovered. We take a look at the possible future of cheap access to space as British Aerospace buy a stake in the SABRE engine designed to power spaceplanes of the future, and we finish off with the truly incredible measurements of Mars atmosphere conducted by NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft to reveal how much atmosphere Mars is losing on an annual basis.

The Interview: This month we wrap the whole show around our interview with Apollo 15 Command Module Pilot Al Worden recorded at this year’s Cosmiccon. We discuss:

Anecdotes from test pilot school in England

Tales of the Harrier and Concorde test pilots

Practical jokes

Riding a Saturn V rocket

Finding organic matter in lunar orbit

Views from 1.5 miles above the mountains of the moon

The history of the moon and the Apollo 15 landing site, Hadley Rille

The bliss of being alone in lunar orbit

The views of space from the far and dark portions behind the moon

The vastness of the universe

Al Worden’s view on UFOs, ancient aliens, numerology and the bible

How to explore further out in space

The stupidity of the design of NASA’s next generation spacecraft

The 5 Minute Concept: We continue our series of back to basics 5 Minute Concepts as Paul takes a look at perhaps the most important piece of hardware in amateur astronomy – no, not the telescope itself, but the mount. As we ask AZ or EQ?

Q&A: Listeners’ questions via email, Facebook & Twitter take us on a journey into the astronomy issues that have always plagued our understanding or stretched our credulity. This month Jen honours the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s General Relativity with a beginner’s crash course, a bit of mythbusting and answers:

What’s inside a black hole? John Barrie from Swansea, Wales via email

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The Discussion: We welcome astrophysicist Jeni Millard from Cardiff University onto the show as our new co-presenter! We discuss the astronomy lessons, tuition and events we’ve been involved with over the past month and name drop about an Apollo moonwalker we might have interviewed…

The News: This month we take a look at NASA’s completed image collection of the Pluto system from the New Horizons spacecraft; ‘Water on Mars’ get the very first Awesome Astronomy award for Needing Another Sensational Announcement (the acronym is entirely coincidental); we take a look at Brian May’s handling of the estate of dearly cherished Patrick Moore; we despair at the media’s handling of ‘that’ news story about an alien megastucture that isn’t around a star with an unusual light curve; and finish up with the European and Russian coalition to explore habitability on the moon for human colonization.

The 5 Minute Concept: We continue our back-to-basics 5 Minute Concepts season with a discussion prompted by many listener questions about the value and use of filters for astronomical observation.

The Interview: This month we bring you our interview with Dr Kathy Thornton, recorded at Cosmiccon. Kathy is a veteran of four Space Shuttle missions and earns our eternal gratitude for fixing the Hubble Space Telescope after launch and giving it back its sight.

Q&A: Listeners’ questions via email, Facebook & Twitter take us on a journey into the astronomy issues that have always plagued our understanding or stretched our credulity. This month Ralph & Paul answer:

One thing you might want to look at is the increasing number of remotely accessible telescopes for the “ordinary” amateur. Not sure if I get the same satisfaction from a remote image compared to spending some nights in my dome and freezing my ears off to get a good image. Would like to get your take on this… Clem Unger from Mornington Australia, via email

The Discussion: Coming live from The AstroCamp in the Brecon Beacons international dark sky reserve, we talk about the benefits of getting out to truly dark skies and observing with people who have a range of astronomy skills.

The News: We welcome astrophysicist Jeni Millard to discuss this month’s astronomy news. And after rebuking NASA last month for the paucity of New Horizons data releases, we’re more content this month and bring you the latest from the Pluto flyby. We take a look at the European Space Agency’s latest video from Philae as it descended to the surface of comet Churyumov Gerasimenko. And we bring you more news about the increasingly habitable conditions on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

The Interview: This month we wrap the whole show around our interview with Skylab 3 and STS-3 astronaut, Jack Lousma. Jack tells us about taking that ominous call during Apollo 13 ‘Houston, we’ve had a problem’; how they solved each life-threatening issue in sequence to get the astronauts back alive; missing out on flying Apollo 20 to the moon; and taking one of the first space shuttles out for a test drive.

Q&A: Listeners’ questions via email, Facebook & Twitter take us on a journey into the astronomy issues that have always plagued our understanding or stretched our credulity. This month Ralph & Paul take a walk around AstroCamp to let listeners give their top tips for taking their first steps in practical amateur astronomy.

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The Discussion: A dismissal of paranoid woo-pedalling, following what seems be an upsurge in space-based pseudoscience this month, and we introduce you to the first in our series of astronaut interviews recorded at Cosmiccon.

The News: This month we get a little disappointed at the lack of news from the New Horizons team after the initial press releases of NASA’s Pluto flyby. We take a look at the nearest confirmed rocky exoplanet to Earth, at 21 light years away, and ask ‘could we send a probe there within the span of a human lifetime?’ New evidence from many of the world’s most productive telescopes that shows the steady heat death of the universe. And a happy story to end on as NASA are offering the public the opportunity to send their names to Mars encoded on a microchip on the Insight Mars Lander next year.

The 5 Minute Concept: We follow up on last month’s first back-to-basics 5 Minute Concepts with an introduction to what you can expect to realistically achieve with amateur telescopes – and Paul gives you his own ‘patent pending’ formula to help you decide if you’re likely to resolve that faint fuzzy.

The Interview: This month we wrap the whole show around our interview with 4 time Shuttle astronaut, Dr Don Thomas. Veteran of 4 Space Shuttle missions (STS-65, STS-70, STS-83, STS-94), Don tells us about how he never gave up in his pursuit to become an astronaut, the incredible views from space (including Mount Everest, meteors and Comet Hale Bopp!), what’s in the Lake Eerie water that Ohio produces to many astronauts, flying through the Challenger & Columbia disasters, the future direction of NASA to the moon, asteroids and Mars and hanging out with Neil Armstrong in the run up to a launch.

Q&A: Listeners’ questions via email, Facebook & Twitter take us on a journey into the astronomy issues that have always plagued our understanding or stretched our credulity. This month Ralph & Paul answer:

· This blew my mind! With a small telescope you can track some binary stars orbiting each other over the years. If I was going to watch a double star year to year looking for movement, what would be my best bet?Andrew Burns, from Reading, England & Randy Anokye from Kumasi, Ghana via the Facebook Group

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A longer episode this month as we have so much to discuss and cram into the show!

The Discussion: Upcoming full-length interviews with 4-time Shuttle astronauts Kathy Thornton & Don Thomas, Skylab 3 & STS-3 astronaut Jack Lousma and Apollo 15 astronaut Al Worden. Dragging Sokol spacesuits around the UK for educational endeavours, promoting astronomy with the UK Space Agency at the Harwell campus and enjoying Nelly Ben Hayoun’s asteroid movie, Disaster Playground, at the British Film Institute.

The News: This month we take a look at NASA’s historic close up of the outer most classical planet as the New Horizon’s spacecraft flies by the Pluto system. CERN’s discovery of a new particle using the Large Hadron Collider – the Pentaquark. The possibility that those mysterious white spots on dwarf planet Ceres are creating a localised atmosphere. A Neptune-sized exoplanet orbiting so close to its parent star that its atmosphere is being blown away like a comet’s tail and Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft continues to attempt re-contact with the functioning Philae comet lander.

The 5 Minute Concept: We kick off a series of back-to-basics 5 Minute Concepts for practical astronomers with a look at what those numbers on your telescope mean. This is a tour of aperture, focal length and focal ratio.

The Interview: This month we welcome back Dr Joe Liske for the final time to tell us about the future of the European Southern Observatory and their exoplanet hunting, dark energy characterising European Extremely Large Telescope.

Q&A: Listeners’ questions via email, Facebook & Twitter take us on a journey into the astronomy issues that have always plagued our understanding or stretched our credulity. This month Ralph & Paul answer:

· What’s excited you more: Rosetta or New Horizons? For me, the latter.Eric Emms, London UK, via Twitter

Sci-fi Wars: Matt Kingsnorth & Phil St Pier join us again to go through the listeners’ results in our Sci-Fi Wars series. You voted for your Top Ten Sci-fi TV Series, books and movies. We present the results!

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The Discussion: This month’s Awesome Astronomy comes from the magnificent Cosmic Con event at the Manchester Airport Hilton. While looking forward to speaking with the stars of Meteorite Men and four astronauts, Paul recalls a fun June letting the public try on a genuine Russian Sokol suit at a multitude of astronomy outreach events, while Ralph’s been experimenting with ways to take deep sky images in heavily light polluted skies.

The Walkaround: No news, 5 minute concept or Q&A this month but you won’t be disappointed as we tour Cosmic Con. The plethora of fascinating meteorites brought by Geoff Notkin and Steve Arnold from the Meteorite Men and space rocks from the British and Irish Meteorite Society gives Paul an opportunity to explain what a treasure trove of science and history meteorites are. Ralph’s in seventh heaven perusing The Space Collective’s NASA memorabilia – a signed Buzz Aldrin action man anyone?

The Interviews: A whole host of interviews this month as we talk to astronauts, space agency workers, meteorite enthusiasts & organisations hoping to save humanity from extinction.

Jane MacArthur – STEM ambassador and PhD student of Martian meteorites and comet samples, explaining the variety of space rocks and what they can tell us about the early solar system.

Martin Goff – member of the British and Irish Meteorite Society, talking about incidents of impacts from Chelyabinsk to the unfortunate Cow Killer meteorite

Andrea Boyd – European Space Agency’s Astronaut Centre, exploring ESA’s new astronaut intake, British astronaut Tim Peake, life on orbit and an offer to try the joy that is Italian designed space food!

Cristina Stanilescu – Project presenter for the Emergency Asteroid Defence Project, telling us about ways to prevent city obliterating asteroids from hitting Earth before they get here.

Don Thomas – Space Shuttle veteran of STS-65, STS-70, STS-83 & STS-94 revealing his experiences of riding rockets and the woodpecker that delayed a launch!

Kathryn Thornton – Space Shuttle veteran of STS-33, STS 49, STS-61 & STS-73, telling us about fixing the Hubble Space Telescope and the possible rosy future for Hubble.

Jack Lousma – Veteran of Skylab 3 & STS-3, reliving tales of America’s first space station and test flying the space shuttle.

Al Worden – Veteran of Apollo 15, one of only 24 people to orbit the moon, tells us about how to get to the moon & back and flying in perpetual freefall.

So, a huge thanks to Richard and Yolande, the organisers of Cosmic Con for inviting us to record from their wonderful astronomy-laden event. We hope you enjoyed the atmosphere even if you couldn’t make it this year. And we hope to see you there next year.