The Sky At Night – We just don’t know!
This month’s Sky At Night is about things we just don’t know about. Patrick is joined by Chris, Kate Land and Prof. Gerry Gilmore to talk about everything from what was before the Big Bang to dark matter and dark energy. The episode covers the topics of inflation as well as the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation and even why we are here at this time in the history of the Universe. You can catch the episode on BBC iPlayer here and again (extended by 10 mins) on various BBC channels.
BBC Sky At Night magazine podcast now on iTunes
What the title says really. For those of you that want to subscribe it’s on iTunes here.
BBC Sky At Night magazine podcast released
Our new podcast is now out on its very own webpage here. In the first episode Sky At Night magazine’s editor Graham Southorn and I chat about the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting that I visited a few weeks ago.
If you listen to the podcast you can also find out what James Bond has been doing at one of the world’s largest observatories (the VLT in Chile), hear about the latest on the plans to upgrade Hubble this summer and the discovery of the youngest extrasolar planet ever found.
International Year of Astronomy 2009 trailer
Turn up the sound on your computer, get ready and watch this! It’s a new trailer for the International Year of Astronomy 2009. Very cool indeed. The Year is fast approaching and there will be lots happening around the globe. If you haven’t got any ideas on what to do (but want to get involved) contact your national node, get some ideas from here and get involved!
Credit: International Year of Astronomy 2009, IAU and UNESCO
P.S. another new site definitely worth a look is the new International Astronomical Union website. There’s a wealth of information on there. Especially make sure to check out the ‘themes’ section – it’s the definitive IAU reference for lots of subjects like naming stars, classifying planets and much more. Oh and if you want the HD version of the above trailer be sure to get it here.
The Sky At Night – The Sun revealed
Just a quick reminder that The Sky At Night is on BBC Four tomorrow night at 20:00 (more details, repeats etc., here). The title is ‘The Sun revealed’ and looks as if it will be covering the onset of solar cycle 24 and the Ulysses spacecraft which I blogged about recently.
07.04.08 edit: If you are in the UK you can also watch the programme on BBC iPlayer here for the next 6 days.
Farside radio astronomy one step closer
For a long time astronomers (specifically radio astronomers) have wanted to place a telescope on the Moon. Now it seems that that desire is slowly becoming a possibility. NASA recently announced how it was backing a series of studies to investigate potential experiments for its ‘Next Generation Astronomy Missions’. Included in that backing is one proposal from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build a small radio telescope array on the Moon’s far-side.
Radio telescopes are really important tools for probing the Universe. All sorts of objects emit radio waves; quasars, very hot gas in the space between the stars, electrons rapidly whirring around in magnetic fields as well as planets to name but a few. On Earth radio astronomy has been at the forefront of astronomical research for decades. Indeed many of the great discoveries of modern astronomy have been made thanks to the use of radio telescopes; for example the radio telescope (MK1A) at Jodrell Bank Observatory in the UK discovered the first gravitational lens amongst its many great accomplishments.
But there is a problem with doing radio astronomy from Earth. Radio signals from astronomical objects are extremely faint; something that makes observing radio sources tricky even on a good day. But radio waves, of course, don’t just come from the sky. Radio stations, satellites, Wi-Fi networks and many other man-made sources all emit vast amounts of radio waves that are much more powerful than those coming from space. With this ubiquitous fog of radio waves often ‘spilling’ into the frequencies that astronomers observe in (combined with the fact that the Earth’s ionosphere blocks certain radio signals) it’s a wonder we can observe anything emitting radio waves in space; sorting the proverbial radio wheat from the chaff is no easy task.
What radio astronomers really need is something to block all the ‘noise’ coming from the Earth. Something like a massive shield…something like…the Moon. By locating radio telescopes (or groups of smaller telescopes called ‘arrays’) on the lunar ‘farside’ the telescopes are hidden from the radio noise from the Earth, since the farside is always in the radio ‘shadow’ of the Moon, plus they don’t have the Earth’s ionosphere to contend with!
MIT’s proposed telescope will consist of hundreds of small instruments set up across about 2 square kilometres to studio low frequency radio waves. The telescopes will be arranged by robotic machines and they don’t have to be that accurate since the wavelenghts that the array will study are fairly long. The array will probe some of the least well known periods of the Universe’s early history as well as looking at space-weather from the solar wind, radio emissions from the planets and possibly even galaxies too.
I’m going to be talking to Dominic King live on BBC Radio Kent at 10:30am tomorrow morning about the ambitious plans for these lunar observatories so if you are in south-east England tune in!
Above: ‘Farside’ radio telescopes will be able to tell us more about periods in the early Universe, earlier than the HUDF (pictured).
Credit: NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team
The Sky At Night – Return to the Moon
If you didn’t catch last night’s Sky At Night programme then you should try and watch it in the next 7 days on BBC iPlayer or when it is repeated on BBC 2 this Saturday at 13:30*.
The episode is an hour long special called ‘Return to the Moon’. It covers everything from NASA’s Constellation program, the recent lunar eclipse, the hardware NASA are going to be using, the UK’s MoonLITE experiment and some great exchanges on the history of lunar observing (and of course Sir Patrick’s contribution) between Dr Allan Chapman and Sir Patrick. It really is a great episode and one not to miss.
Oh and if you haven’t already seen it you should check out the latest astounding image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Chris has it over here.
*The BBC’s What’s On listing that I found lists the repeated episode as only 20 minutes long.
Above: NASA’s Orion craft (left) docked with the Altair lunar lander.
Image credit: NASA
A step back in the right direction…
This is great news. Though as Johnathon Amos reports in his BBC online article we are going to have to wait a while to see what this means now for the STFC budget.
Hubblecast filming
On Tuesday morning a small team from the ESA/Hubble office here traveled to a studio to film the next episode of the Hubblecast (no.9). The studio is located about 70km south of ESO headquarters, in the foothills of the Alps on the shore of Tegernsee a perfect place for the creative juices to flow!
We began work at about 9am with the shooting of Dr J’s introduction scenes as well as some more regular pieces to camera. In this episode we have pushed the boat out with some of the graphic effects too, the results of which you will see soon! After a couple of hours work the filming was complete and it was back to the office where the video could be added to the images and animations made by the graphic designer.
Image credit: Will Gater
I’ve just watched a preliminary cut of one scene and it is looking really very cool! Hopefully this will be one of the best Hubblecasts yet!
In the shadow of the Moon
Last night I attended a preview screening of a new film called ‘In the shadow of the Moon’ about the Apollo moon landings. It’s an emotional, exciting and frequently amusing account of the program in the Apollo astronauts own words with previously unseen NASA archive footage and some great interviews. I thoroughly recommend you check it out when it comes out in cinemas on October 26th this year. Edit – I have now been informed the film will now be released on Nov. 2nd.
