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Extra: AstroCamp Autumn 2016




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In this month’s AstroCamp podcast extra episode:

The Discussion: An introduction to star parties and enjoying practical astronomy under pristine dark skies away from the city. As the podcast crew run the AstroCamp star party, which many listeners attend, in the Brecon Beacon’s international dark sky reserve twice a year, we take you through the events, tutorials and workshops we run to help you hone your stargazing skills and win astronomy prizes from the Tring Astronomy Centre.

The Sky guides: In readiness for 3 nights of stargazing in the Welsh valleys, Ralph, Paul and Damien choose objects to look out for this time of year. If you’re not coming to AstroCamp, these are still great night sky treats to try and locate wherever you are in the northern hemisphere.

Ralph’s top choices take in the Owl Cluster, The Double Cluster and the vast North America Nebula.

Damien takes a look at the solar system objects available a little closer to home this month as he runs through the asteroids, dwarf planets and meteor showers on offer to AstroCampers

And Paul finishes out autumnal round up with Herschel’s Garnet Star, the original Cepheid Variable and the magnificent galaxy cluster Stephan’s Quintet.

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#51 – September 2016




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The Discussion: Jeni’s astronomy research yields its first results in the hunt for exoplanet phase variation and we revisit our Star Wars podcast extras with a listener’s book review.

The News: Rounding up the space and astronomy news this month we have:

  • An ‘Earthlike planet detected by ESO around our nearest stellar neighbour
  • The upcoming launch of OSIRIS Rex to sample an asteroid
  • That bump in the data at CERN turns out to be a false hope
  • That alien megastructure story just won’t foxtrot oscar
  • The Cassini spacecraft spots methane filled canyons on Saturn’s moon Titan
  • A meteorite lands in Yorkshire garden. Real or fake?

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 Paul’s festering Hat of Woo: Area 51 – the remote and secret installation in the Nevada desert where sanity gets dissected and reason is left to die.

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 get a question that probes certainty in science and how high certainty discoveries can still turn out to be wrong:

Why when the Bicep two team found the evidence for primordial gravitational waves did they claim it was a five sigma result, and later wasn’t it shown the result was not accurate? I thought a five sigma had a 1 in 350million chance of being wrong! There has to be something I don’t understand about the sigma scale or the Bicep results? Rodney Cuthbertson.

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Sky Guide September 2016




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What to look out, and up, for in September.

Our highlights of this month’s skies with the planet on offer to observers and imagers:

  • Mercury & Venus in the late evening or early morning
  • Mars & Saturn – with a nice conjunction with the Moon and star Antares
  • Neptune & Uranus on offer in Aquarius & Pisces
  • The largest asteroid, Vesta, will be passing through the constellation Gemini into Cancer this month and asteroid 2 Pallas can still be found in the constellation Equuelus.

Next up is the meteor showers and, following the magnificent Persieds last month, September has:

  • The Alpha Aurigids peaking on 1st September
  • The Epsilon Persieds peaking on 9th September

Then we each take a deep sky pick from our list of favourites for this time of year:

  • Ralph – The Owl Custer in Cassiopeia
  • Paul – globular cluster, Messier 2 in Aquarius
  • Jeni – The Andromeda Galaxy in the constellation Andromeda

And we finish this sky guide with September’s moon phases.

Happy hunting and clear skies!

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Extra: Dr Helen Sharman the Full Interview




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This podcast extra is our full length interview with Dr Helen Sharman, Britain’s First astronaut and the first woman to visit the Russian Mir Space Station in 1991.

In this interview we discuss:

  • Tim Peake
  • Access to space during a time of no UK funding
  • The skills needed to be an astronaut
  • Training for spaceflight at Star City in Russia
  • The collapse of the Soviet Union just before launch
  • Speaking with Mikhail Gorbachev from the Mir Space Station
  • Comparing Mir to a camping trip!
  • Acclimatising to spaceflight in the Soyuz capsule
  • Science conducted by Helen on Mir
  • The UK’s reticence to fund human spaceflight
  • NASA’s plans for missions beyond Low Earth Orbit
  • Post-Brexit uncertainty over science and collaboration
  • Promoting space
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#50 – August 2016

The Discussion: We’re cheering Jeni’s graduation with a first class masters in astrophysics and looking at the PhD options she has as she chases the dream of becoming Dr Millard! Paul & Ralph make preparations for September’s dark sky AstroCamp stargazing event and educate Jeni on computers from the 80s.

The News: Rounding up the space and astronomy news this month we have:

  • A new dwarf planet is discovered in our solar system
  • The doomed Hitachi spacecraft reveals streams of intergalactic plasma
  • A new moon around Earth discovered
  • Detective work reveals what caused the moon’s Imbrium Basin
  • Tatooine gets outshone by a planet with three stars
  • The first observation of a snowline in a forming solar system

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 Paul’s festering Hat of Woo: Chemtrails – those quite normal jet exhaust trails that some people think are spraying mind control agents

The Interview: For the interview this month we visit Dr Helen Sharman from Imperial College London, who because Britain’s first astronaut in 1991:

  • Tim Peake’s slight embarrassment at often being called Britain’s 1st astronaut
  • An unconventional route to space
  • Training to be an astronaut at Russia’s Star City
  • The Mir space station compared to the International Space Station
  • Excitement for the future of human spaceflight
  • Uncertainty over space and science funding in the Brexit era.
  • The full interview with Helen will be available as a podcast extra later in the month

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 get a question that follows the theme of our introduction and looks directly at the point Helen Sharman raised in this month’s interview:

What does Brexit mean for the UKs involvement in things like ESA and ESO? Andrew Burns, United Kingdom

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Sky Guide August 2016




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What to look out, and up, for in August.

Our highlights of this month’s skies with the planet on offer to observers and imagers:

  • Jupiter takes a bow as it departs until December
  • Mars & Saturn – with a long conjunction at the end of August
  • Mercury & Venus make their way out of the glare of the Sun
  • Neptune & Uranus on offer in Aquarius & Pisces

Next up is the meteor showers and, due to the long daylight hours and dearth of cometary debris in this part of Earth’s orbit this time of year, we only have one shower of note in August:

  • The magnificent Perseids peaking on 11th/12th August
  • The 2nd asteroid to be discovered in the asteroid belt, 2 Pallas, reaches opposition on 22nd August reaching magnitude 8.7 and can be found in the constellation Equuelus.

Then we each take a deep sky pick from our list of favourites for this time of year:

  • Jeni – The Milky Way: Naked eye enjoyment of our home galaxy
  • Paul – The Cygnus Loop/The Veil Nebulae
  • Ralph – Albireo – the most colourful binary star in the sky

And we finish this sky guide with August’s moon phases.

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Extra: Alan Bean, 4th Man on the Moon




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This podcast extra is our full length interview with the 4th man to walk on the moon aboard the Apollo 12 mission in 1969.

In this interview we discuss:

  • journeying to the moon on a Saturn V rocket
  • getting your rocket struck by lightening
  • the mission’s colourful commander (Pete Conrad)
  • what the moon looked and felt like underfoot
  • the science conducted on the surface of the moon
  • the future of human spaceflight
  • The Martian Olympics!
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#49 – July 2016




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The Discussion: Earthling slave John got married! The new fashion of requesting telescopes at weddings, a good time of year for solar astronomy, the scores are in for the results of Jeni’s master’s degree, Jeni gets a sciencey summer job and we make a joking (but no less genuine) appeal for astronomy equipment to review in future shows.

The News: Rounding up the space and astronomy news this month we have:

  • NASA inflate Bigelow Aerospace’s inflatable habitat on the ISS
  • Progress on NASA’s attempts to send humans beyond low Earth orbit
  • Analysis of ALMA data hints at planetary formation beginning earlier than thought
  • An update on the origins of the elusive Planet 9
  • The Jupiter-bound Juno spacecraft gets ready to orbit the gas giant
  • Arizona astronomers find 65 young galaxies – the oldest galaxy cluster yet discovered

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 Paul’s Big Hat of Woo, is moon landing hoaxers – the mother of all space-related conspiracy theories!

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 get a question about our own observing and imaging of the skies:

How do you think the name of Planet 9 will be chosen if it’s eventually discovered – is it too late to start a campaign for Planet McPlanetface? Gavin Mills from Canberra, Australia

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Sky Guide July 2016




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What to look out, and up, for in July.

Our highlights of this month’s skies with the planet on offer to observers and imagers:

  • Mars
  • Saturn
  • A Venus conjunction

And a few tips on how to take images of the solar system’s largest bodies with a webcam, planetary imaging camera or DSLR.

Next up is the meteor showers and, due to the long daylight hours and dearth of cometary debris in this part of Earth’s orbit this time of year, we only have one shower of note in July:

  • Delta Aquariids peaking 28th/29th July

Then we each take a deep sky pick from our list of favourites for this time of year:

  • Jeni – NGC6826: The Blinking Star Nebula
  • Ralph – Epsilon Lyrae: The Double Double
  • Paul – M22, a globular Cluster in Sagittarius.

And we finish this sky guide with July’s moon phases and planetary conjunctions.

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Extra: Marvelous Mercury!




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In this Awesome Astronomy podcast extra episode we bring you the key speakers from this spring’s AstroCamp in the Brecon Beacon dark sky reserve. As the transit of Mercury was the main feature of this spring’s camp, we were delighted to welcome (and now to share with you) speakers with detailed knowledge of planetary transits:

  • Dr Rebekah Higgitt lectures history at the University of Kent and former curator at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. Rebekah tells us about the science goals of observing transits, foreign wars, treacherous seas and national rivalries that conspired to prevent observations and the successes and mishaps that befell many astronomers keen to use this method to measure the size of the solar system.
  • London astronomer and professional gemmologist, Eric Emms, hosts many public solar and lunar observing events (the next of which will be in London’s Regent’s Park on June 23rd) and steers Central London’s Astronomical Society as a committee member of the Baker Street Irregular astronomers.

    Eric takes us on a voyage to Mercury to show us why this is far from the dull dry world that many may think.