AWESOME ASTRONOMY

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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