365 Days of Astronomy

July 3rd: Universe Awareness: Children’s Voices

kortney.hogan — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:00:47 +0000

Date: July 3, 2009

Title: Universe Awareness: Children's Voices

Podcaster: Carolina Ödman

Organization: Universe Awareness (UNAWE) http://www.unawe.org/

Description: Universe Awareness (UNAWE) is the only IYA2009 cornerstone project specifically for children. UNAWE started in 2005 and has now active groups in nearly 30 countries. The programme will continue beyond 2009. If you are interested in joining UNAWE, contact us at carolina.odman@unawe.org or check out our website http://www.unawe.org/.

Bio: Carolina Ödman is the international project manager of Universe Awareness. She studied Physics Engineering in Switzerland and completed her PhD in cosmology at the University of Cambridge in 2003. After working as a consultant at UNESCO and a brief lecture round at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), she joined the University or Rome La Sapienza for a post-doc. Since 2005 she works at Leiden Observatory.

Today's sponsor: This episode of "365 Days of Astronomy" is sponsored by Palomar Observatory.

Transcript:
When was the last time you looked up at the night sky and were caught by surprise by its beauty? Do you remember the first time that you saw a real photograph of planet earth taken from space, and what it made you feel? Have you ever been in a completely isolated landscape, in a field, in a desert, on top of a mountain, where the only thing you can see at night is the stars - and it makes you feel so close to them that it feels like you're floating out in space with them? Well, you are.

The realisation of our place in the universe is a wonderful and humbling experience that brings us to a peaceful contemplation of ourselves and our lives and that brings all the worries and the concerns into perspective. "Does it really matter?" we ask ourselves, as the beauty of the night sky unravels before our eyes.

When they proclaimed 2009 the International Year of Astronomy the United Nations made a very strong statement. The UN affirmed that astronomy, often seen as an expensive science, with pretty pictures but little everyday impact, is in fact much more. The UN elevated astronomy to the rank of world changing discipline that contributes directly to all mankind through education, sustainable development, environmental awareness, technological development and last but not least, the expansion of human knowledge and exploration. It's our delightful mission to seize this opportunity and make sure that the UN was right in its vision.

In today's podcast we are lucky to have some children who share their stories about the universe with us. They may have preconceptions, or ill-conceived or ill-understood ideas, but that doesn't matter, because when they are thinking about the universe, when the children are learning astronomy, they're exploring with their curious and inquisitive and imaginative minds something that is greater than what anyone of us will ever be able to fully understand and comprehend.

So here are some children's voices, for and on behalf of Universe Awareness.

[Interview of a young child in Tamil (India):
...K. chandru ... airplanes ... natchattiram ... Bhooma devi ...]

When asked what he thinks of the Universe, K. Chandru in Tamil Nadu, India, first thinks of airplanes. And then he thinks of stars, and the third thing he can think of is the Earth god(*). What do you think?

(*) It is in fact an earth goddess

[Interview in English (India):
The Universe is a vast area, infinite in volume. It consists of 9 planets, the sun and other galaxies. Earth is the only planet in the universe, which has life, oxygen, atmosphere, water. ....]

This young man has obviously learnt a lot at school and he knows a lot about the universe but have you noticed how the Earth remains a very special place?

[Game with young children repeating the names of the planets (Kenya):
...Mercury ... Venus ... Earth ... Mars! ... Mercury ... Venus ... Earth ... Mars!...]

[Game with young children playing the dance of the planets (Venezuela):
Mercurio! ... No andre vez... La tierra ... Marte .... Jupiter ... Saturno!]

[Talking about the planets in Arabic (Tunisia):
...Venus ... Aard ... Merrich ... Mouchtery ... Zouhal ... Uranus ... Neptune ... Pluton. Pluton ....]

(The sound from the astronomy lesson in Tunisia fades into the background)

Planet Earth, a very special place indeed. A place where people around the world show children the beauty of the universe and when they do, this happens

[Astronomy lesson continued (Tunisia):
whoaaa!]....

[Astronomy workshop (South Africa):
we live on a planet...
whoooaw...
This is home! This planet is home and this is home!]

[Astronomy workshop. A rhyming song where children repeat the following (South Africa):
In the Big Universe
There are lots of galaxies
In every galaxy
There are lots and lots of stars!
One little star
We call our sun!
Our home
Is on a planet
That goes around the sun!
We call it planet Earth
In the big Universe...](*)

(*) This rhyming song can be found on the UNAWe website at:
http://unawe.org/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=386&Itemid=140

And that's it for today's episode.
In this episode were featured young children from universe Awareness programmes in India, Venezuela, Tunisia, South Africa and Kenya.

The featured music was first Clair de Lune by Debussy played by Simionescu, followed by the first piece for children by Bartok played by Breemer, both courtesy of the PianoSociety.org. Followed by Pachelbel's canon in D, interpreted on the harp by Andrea Steckermeier-Thiele, courtesy of ClassicCat.com. A couple of sound effects are courtesy of soundjay.com

Thank you and we look forward to joining you again for the next Universe Awareness episode of the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast.

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
=====================
The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the New Media Working Group of the International Year of Astronomy 2009. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. Until tomorrow...goodbye.

July 2nd: Herschel and Planck Set Sail into the Cold Universe

kortney.hogan — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:00:23 +0000

Date: July 2, 2009

Title: Herschel and Planck Set Sail into the Cold Universe

Podcaster: Edward and Haley Gomez

Organization: Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope and Cardiff University
http://www.lcogt.net
http://www.astro.cf.ac.uk

Description: Herschel and Planck set sail into the cold Universe. The successful launch of the Herschel Space Observatory and Planck satellite on 18 May this year was an exhilarating and nerve-racking experience for those involved with these missions. We interviewed some of the astronomers and engineers involved at the launch event in Cardiff University to find out their feelings, opinions and predictions of discoveries to come.

Bio: Dr. Edward Gomez works for Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope
(http://lcogt.net) as the education and outreach manager. He is involved in many other science engagement projects, including the 'Science or Fiction' podcast series, 'Teapots from Space' vodcasts and is a lay-editor for Portal to the Universe. Edward likes coffee and a paper on a Sunday morning, while listening to some baroque music.

Dr. Haley Gomez is a lecturer in Astrophysics at Cardiff University. She is part of the scientific groups who will use Herschel to discover more about the cool Universe and is particularly interested in finding out where cosmic dust comes from.

Today's sponsor: This episode of "365 Days of Astronomy" is sponsored by AAVSO.

Transcript:

E.G: Dr. Edward Gomez of Las Cumbres Observatory, Inc.
H.G: Dr. Haley Gomez of Cardiff University
L.D: Dr. Loretta Dunne of Nottingham University
P.C: Prof. Peter Coles of Cardiff University
M.E: Prof Mike Edmunds of Cardiff University
J.D: Dr. Jon Davies of Cardiff University
S.E: Prof. Steve Eales of Cardiff University
P.H: Dr. Pete Hargrave of Cardiff University

Voice over from ESA Mission Control:
Dix...Neuf...Huit...Sept...Six...Cinque...Quatre...Trois...Deux...Un...TAKE-OFF
[Applause]

E.G: Iʼm Edward Gomez from Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope

H.G: and Iʼm Haley Gomez from Cardiff University

E.G: The countdown was for the successful launch of the Ariane 5 which carried the Herschel space Observatory and Planck Satellite. We were lucky enough to be invited to the launch party at Cardiff University. At the launch event were scientists and engineers whoʼd spent the last ten to fifteen years working on both satellites. Lots of astronomers we talked to mentioned the things they want to do with Herschel and Planck over the next three or four years, including some of the big questions they want to answer. Questions about the origins of the Universe, the birth place of stars and where the building blocks of life are formed. During the launch party we interviewed people to see how they felt now that Planck and Herschel are safely in space.

M.E: Man is a curious creature. Always where there have been significant technical advances weʼve learnt vastly more about the Universe. Itʼs four hundred years since Galileo Galilei turned his telescope to the heavens and began to realize the moon had mountains and all sorts of things.

J.D: This probing into space with a very large telescope at a new wavelength region will produce very exciting results. In the rough history of astronomy, man has observed the Universe through this very tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum and weʼre now expanding it to the X-ray and gamma-ray, into the far infrared and radio. Herschel and Planck will look at the particular part of the spectrum which is detecting things that are cold in the Universe. This is the last frontier.

E.G: Herschel and Planck are able to see light thatʼs never been seen before. This is because Herschel is an infra-red telescope, itʼs the largest mirror ever launched into space and it will search for some of the coldest things in the Universe.

H.G: We asked the astronomers why it is they care about the cold things in the Universe and what it is Herschel will go and see.

L.D: Herschel will study rare things like active galactic nuclei and quasars and galaxies that have have black holes in the centre. Theyʼre quite rare. However we should pick up tens of thousands of them with our survey.

J.D: Itʼs extremely important to understand the whole process of stellar evolution and galaxy evolution.

L.D: We can also see stars forming in our own galaxy but maybe they are also forming in places other people haven't looked so far. So when people try to look at star formation in our own Milky Way galaxy they tend to look at a region right near the middle of the galaxy where everything is very dense. It could be that stars form in a different way in these places and weʼll find out.

P.C: We have a standard model of cosmology now which is a working hypotheses and we think that it fits, but that doesn't mean that it is absolutely right. Planck will either tell us that weʼre on the right track or it will reveal evidence of things which canʼt be explained within a standard framework and in many ways the second of those is the most exciting one. Itʼs always more exciting when you have a revolution and it turns out that what youʼve been
thinking about so far is wrong.

E.G: Peter then went on to say that the scientific purpose of these missions are very different even though theyʼre both looking at cold things in the Universe and were both both launched on the same rocket.

P.C: The point about Planck is itʼs very different from Herschel in the sense that Herschel is like a traditional astronomical observatory except itʼs in space. It will be doing a large range of space observations. It will be looking at stars and galaxies and so on and it will be to some extend negotiable about what it does, in response to different demands. Planck is not an observatory, itʼs an experiment. Itʼs really there to do one particular thing and itʼs quite interesting to compare the cultural differences between them. Planck is very much more like a physics experiment.

H.G: I have to say I agree totally with Peter. Which mission will hopefully end up winning a Nobel prize is something we don't know and canʼt answer just yet. One of the really interesting things will be what they find new, things that we didn't ever imagine that they will find in the first place.

E.G: Which is always the most exciting thing about science. So thatʼs why we asked the scientists what unexpected results they hoped these two satellites would answer.

M.E: On a personal basis, understanding what dust is in the Universe and how much there really is there and where it comes from. Whether al lot of it is made in supernova rather than stars: Iʼm looking forward to that one.

P.C: I think that the most important questions that Planck will answer is whether our understanding of the early Universe is actually right. So currently, we has this idea that the very early stages of the Universe there was a thing called inflation which caused the Universe to expand by an enormous factor. That idea is built in the standard version of the Big Bang and we think itʼs right on the basis of the measurements obtained so far. However Planck will tell us really whether thatʼs the right way of thinking about the Universe or not.

J.D: I think the most important thing is the quantity of cold dust there is in the universe, which will tell us about the history of star formation.

S.E: The origin of the galaxies or the origin of elliptical galaxies because we already know that there is a population of dust enshrouded objects in the early Universe. People suspect that they might be the progenitors of galaxies today. Herschel should allow us to make the connection between this population in the very early Universe that weʼre seeing billions of years in the past and the ellipticals today.

E.G: Steve Eales mentioned dust enshrouded objects, which is something you areinterested in Haley.

H.G: Well I'm really interested in finding out where cosmic dust comes from. Itʼs
something thatʼs really important to astronomers because it plays such an important part in a number of different processes in the Universe and the Earth is a giant dust grain. So finding out where dust comes from is really important to us.

L.D: Dust is important because that really affects how we see the Universe. If we just look in the optical, thatʼs the visible light we see around us every day, then if there's any dust around it, it blocks that out. So itʼs like standing in a smoky room. So to be able to see everything thatʼs happening in the universe since it started, we need to be able to look at more of the light thatʼs been stolen from the optical and then re-radiated back in the infrared.

H.G: Really the most wonderful things about these missions will be the things we canʼt predict.

E.G: The wonderful thing about the astronomy and in any scientific research is the discoveries that are made that you werenʼt expecting. A sentiment that everybody present at this event agreed with.

P.C: The funding agencies have a thing about [pause] you have to say what youʼre going to discover with a given experiment and of course astronomy hasn't worked like that. We haven't seen anything in the ultra violet or infra-red so we need to look. We don't really know what weʼre going to find, but itʼll be interesting. Itʼs not just actually figuring out answers to problems that we know, its the fact youʼre trying to explore something thatʼs never been explored before. You hope there will be new types of objects we detect with Herschel. It is the final, last electromagnetic frontier. So there is a chance we may find something completely new.

E.G: Fortunately the rocket that carried Herschel and Planck launched perfectly and both Herschel and Planck are on their way to the place where they will spend they rest of their lives, well their working lives anyway.

P.H: It [Herschel and Planck] will spend three months before it reaches its orbital point: 1.5 million kilometers away, checking out the instruments; seeing how itʼs performing and making sure it can achieve itʼs scientific goals. I think at that point everyone will breath a huge sigh of relief. Weʼre already starting to relax more now. I was very nervous this morning, my finger nails got a bit of a hammering. I spent fifteen years of my life and most of my hair on this project, I feel a lot better now. Certainly more relieved.

E.G: That was Pete Hargrave who was one of the mission scientists on the Spire
instrument which is on board Herschel.

H.G: What these two satellites will do is completely revolutionize, particularly in the case of Planck, revolutionize the way we even teach astronomy. Iʼm sure undergraduate students in three of four years will be told different things than we were.

E.G: And I think that it is going to answer a lot of questions but throw up as many as it answers. I was Edward Gomez

H.G: and I was Haley Gomez E.G: Weʼd like to thank all the scientists involved from Cardiff University and Nottingham University H.G: and all the instrument builders that made it work so well. So keep an eye on the news and watch this space for Herschel and Planck discoveries.

S.E: We feel passionate about dust. A lot of people here are really, totally, fixated, obsessed about interstellar dust.

End of podcast:

July 1st: S.K.A Music — The Square Kilometer Array

kortney.hogan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:00:35 +0000

Date: July 1, 2009

Title: S.K.A Music -- The Square Kilometer Array

Podcaster: Kylie Sturgess

Organization: Skeptic Zone: http://www.skepticzone.tv/

Description: The Square Kilometer Array is the next generation radio telescope that will explore the cosmos like never before - and may very well call Australia home. An interview with Professor Steven Tingay, the co-Director of the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy, Curtin University, Western Australia.

Bio: Kylie Sturgess is a reporter for the Skeptic Zone Podcast - Australia's leading skeptical podcast with reports from around the world - and a researcher of gender differences in paranormal beliefs and superstitious behaviors.

Today's sponsor: This episode of "365 Days of Astronomy" is sponsored by the parents of Ben Given, in honor of his 9th birthday. Happy Birthday, Ben. We love you.

Transcript:

I'm Kylie Sturgess of the Skeptic Zone podcast. Today you're listening to a little 'ska music' before we learn about the S.K.A.

In radio astronomy, that's an acronym for the ‘Square Kilometer Array’, and is the next generation of radio telescope currently being planned, with my home state Western Australia short-listed to host the instrument.

This episode features Professor Steven Tingay of the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy, who will tell us all about the progress of the project and what exciting things it will tell us - including answering some of the big questions in astrophysics, cosmology and astrobiology. Prepare to have your understanding of the universe - transformed.

Kylie: I’m here talking to Professor Steve Tingay, the co-Director of the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy, and staff member of the Department of Imaging and Applied Physics. He’s very deeply involved in the ‘Square Kilometer Array’ project, as a chair and as a member of a number of working and advisory groups. It’s lovely to meet you Steve!

Steve: Thank you.

Kylie: We’re talking at the moment from the Curtin Institute for Radio Astronomy in Perth, which is in Western Australia – it happens to be the state in Australia which is hoping to host the Square Kilometer Array. Why is Australia interested in this project?

Steve: Australia has a very long tradition in Radio Astronomy and Astronomy in general. So, after the Second World War, Radio Astronomy came to the forefront in a number of different countries, arising out of radar developments in World War Two. Australia was one of the countries that picked this up strongly and built telescopes like the Parkes Dish and so we’ve maintained that history, so naturally our interest lies in being in the forefront and future of Radio Astronomy as well.

The project has a fairly long history, and it has evolved somewhat; it really originated in the late 80s, early 90s, and has developed into this concept of the ‘Square Kilometer Array’. Currently we’re still in the design and conceptual phase of the project, with various pathfinder instruments being built and we hope to be securing funding in the 2012 – 2013 – 2014 time-scale and with a projected completion date of somewhere around 2018-2020.

There are two host countries left in the competition to win…

Kylie: Only two?

Steve: Yes, it’s down to two! A few years ago there were four countries in the bidding to be the host of the S.K.A – China; Argentina / Brazil; Australia and Southern Africa. A few years ago we went through a selection process and Australia and South Africa are the remaining two countries. So, Australia’s proposed site for most of the antennas is in the Murchison Region of Western Australia.

So, CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization), the Federal Government and the State Government, are working hard to establish the Murchison Radio Astronomy Observatory, which is the parcel of land where we propose to host the S.K.A. On that Observatory at the moment there are two Pathfinder telescopes being built. One is the Australian S.K.A Pathfinder, which is being built by CSIRO; the second is called the Murchison Widefield Array, which is being built by an international consortium of universities, mainly. It’s that project that Curtin University is deeply involved with.

Kylie: I’ve heard it described as a ‘revolution in Astronomy’. Why?

Steve: Just because the scale of the instrument, really. The ‘Square Kilometer Array’, as the name suggests, has a collecting area of a square kilometer, which is much, much greater than existing telescopes that have been built. So, the factor of improvement you get in terms of sensitivity and resolution and flexibility of the instrument is far, far greater than any telescope yet built.

So, being a very sensitive telescope, it means we have access to very faint signals from very distant objects. So, a big part of the S.K.A will be to probe the early structure and evolution of the universe. Looking at the very first objects that formed and produced radio waves; also being able to see back to the very beginning and being able to look at the objects around us in the Universe today, and to essentially fill in all the gaps. To see how galaxies evolved soon after the Big Bang, all the way to the current day – and what that will hopefully tell us about not only the structure and the evolution of the galaxies themselves, but also the structure and evolution of the universe.

For example, the space-time fabric of the universe has a particular structure; we’d like to understand the structure better and also the constituency of the Universe. At the moment, we don’t know what 96% of the Universe is made up of and the S.K.A, we hope, will give us some strong hints in that direction.

Kylie: No wonder we’re so keen to be a part of it!

Steve: Well, exactly. It’s physics at the most fundamental level that you can possibly imagine, when you don’t understand what 96% of the Universe is! They’re not the atoms and molecules that we see around us everyday life; it’s something completely different.

Kylie: One of the questions that I’ve heard it might also answer is whether or not there is going to be evidence of life elsewhere in the Universe, which is one of the things that I study – how much people believe in the possibility of other life out there. What sort of things might be identified by the Array, which could constitute ‘alien life is out there’?

Steve: Well, the classic signature that’s been previously looked for at radio wave length is evidence of narrow-band transmissions, from Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars. So, basically, looking for planetary systems where life may have evolved and pointing the radio telescope at those systems to try to pick up narrow-band radio transmissions. Narrow-band radio transmissions could be taken as evidence for high-technology communications, for example, all of the TV signals and radio signals that we generate on earth, propagate out into space and potentially civilizations on other planets could detect us in that manner, so assuming that technology and civilizations, communications have evolved in different parts of the Universe, we can make that assumptions and go on to look for those signals elsewhere.

So, that’s a very direct method, I guess, of searching. The S.K.A will also be able to look for the formation of planetary systems, so directly observe the emission from planets that are forming around stars and so that really tells us about the physics of planetary system formation.

Kylie: I hear that New Zealand may be chipping in to help, perhaps?

Steve: Sure! So, the square kilometer of collecting area isn’t just a single block of collecting area. It’s really a square kilometer broken up into many thousands of individual segments. So, small antennas. Which means that we can distribute the small antennas as far and as wide as we wish.

So, the S.K.A will really be five, ten thousand antennas stretching from one end of the continent to the other. So, if sited in Australia, most antennas will be in Western Australia, with distribution all the way to the East coast – and then perhaps some antennas in New Zealand, to extend that geographical range of the instrument to about five and a half thousand kilometers.

Kylie: Where can people go to find out more about the progress of this project?

Steve: The project is organized as an international consortium, so there’s a website that encapsulates all of that information – at www.skatelescope.org. Go to www.astronomy.curtin.edu.au and get a bit of information about us – there’s also a website for the Murchison Widefield Array at www.mwatelescope.org.

Kylie: Marvelous! Thank you very much, Steve!

The song that was used in this interview is ‘The Air’ by Milo Firewater, which was provided by the Podshow Podsafe Music Network – at www.music.podshow.com. This has been Kylie Sturgess of the Skeptic Zone podcast, found at www.skepticzone.tv.

End of podcast:

June 30th: It’s All About the Reference Frames

kortney.hogan — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:00:08 +0000

Date: June 30, 2009

Title: It's All About the Reference Frames

Podcaster: Kenneth Johnston

Organization: United States Naval Observatory

Description: We're all used to finding directions here on Earth. We orient ourselves based on our local experience of "up-down", "left-right", "front-back". But how do you orient yourself in space? You need a reference frame, and the most precise reference frame we know is provided by the U.S. Naval Observatory.

Bio: Dr. Kenneth Johnston was born in New York City. He received a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering in 1964 from Manhattan College and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from Georgetown University in 1969.

While at Georgetown, he was a summer student at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), then a Postdoctoral Associate at NRL in the Radio Astronomy Branch of the Astronomy and Atmospheric Physics Division from 1969 through 1971. Dr. Johnston formally joined this branch in 1971 as a radio astronomer.

In 1980, Dr. Johnston became the Branch Head of the Radio and IR Astronomy Branch at NRL. He developed a program that applied interferometric techniques for high resolution imaging at optical and radio wavelengths.

In 1993, Dr. Johnston became the Scientific Director for the U.S. Naval Observatory. He is responsible for the scientific oversight of the precise time, time interval, and astrometry programs, developing the first imaging optical interferometer, the Navy Prototype Optical Interferometer (NPOI) located at Flagstaff, AZ.

He is at present developing the areas of radio and optical interferometry for astrometric and imaging applications with both ground and space instruments.

Today's sponsor: This episode of "365 Days of Astronomy" is sponsored by Professor Astronomy, a blog chronicling the day-to-day life and thoughts of a research astronomer, online at blog.professorastronomy.com. Professor Astronomy, wishing a very happy anniversary to Mrs. Astronomy.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m Dr. Ken Johnston, Scientific Director of the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, DC.

A character in a popular movie from the mid-1980’s once said “No matter where you go, there you are”. The ability to determine where “there” is describes a uniquely human trait that has allowed us to explore and inhabit not only nearly every niche of our home planet, but to also leave footprints on our nearest celestial neighbor and send robot emissaries to other worlds in our solar system.

Traveling almost anywhere raises a fundamental problem: in order to determine where you are going, you first have to know where you are, and in order to know where you are, you need to have a frame of reference. Since ancient times, navigators have used the stars to go places. We all know that the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West, which helps us when looking at a map and discerning the direction of North. Early navigators used the altitudes of stars to travel along parallels of latitude to reach islands over vast ocean regions such as the Pacific. Shortly after Galileo’s discovery of the moons of Jupiter, astronomers looked into determining longitude using the positions of Jupiter’s moons. With John Harrison’s development of the chronometer in the 18th century, the stars and a chronometer determined positions. Later, in the 20th century, low frequency radio wave broadcasts from multiple locations were used for coastal navigation. Today the Global Positioning System, or GPS, is used to pinpoint one’s location. GPS relies on precisely defined satellite orbits determined via a solution of signals received at many ground stations distributed worldwide. The time for these signals is generated by very accurate on-board atomic clocks, which are kept in synch with the U.S. Naval Observatory’s Master Clock to a precision of better than 10 billionths of a second. So it would seem that today there is no need for using stars to determine positions.

In looking at the furniture in your office and house, it appears that everything is at a fixed position relative to you. However, you are located on a small planet in the Solar System which is moving through space. While seemingly standing still on the Earth you’re actually on the surface of a rotating sphere. If you are on the Equator you are moving at a velocity of over 1,000 miles per hour due to this rotation. This sphere is revolving about the Sun at 19 miles per second. The Sun revolves about the center of the Milky Way galaxy at a velocity of 138 miles per second, and the galaxy itself is moving at 394 miles per second in the direction of the constellation of Hydra. And you don’t even feel dizzy.

On a more subtle scale, there is a twice-a-day variation of 20 inches in the height on the equator with respect to the center of the Earth due to the tidal pull of the Moon and Sun. There are many other motions, such as continental drift at 0.4 inches per year, the 26,000 year precession of the planet’s rotation axis, small semi-periodic “nutations” in the precession cycle, and small but significant changes in the positions of Earth’s rotational poles that also take place. So how do we determine where we are in time and space?

The answer still lies in the sky. Stars in the Milky Way show motions due to their movement through the galaxy as well as the annual apparent reflex motion known as parallax, caused by the Earth revolving around the Sun. The simple fact is that the stars move. The familiar constellations of tonight’s sky will be completely distorted about 100 thousand years from now by these stellar motions. Basing a reference frame on moving targets means that every 50 years or so the reference stars and all the objects that relate to them must have their positions re-computed, an enormous task given the number of catalogued objects in the Universe.

The solution to this dilemma is to find a reference frame that does not move. Fortunately, Nature has given us the perfect objects to meet this need: quasars. Quasars were once very abundant when the Universe was very young. They are believed to have been enormous “black holes” in the centers of the first galaxies to form after the Big Bang. They are so far away that their high-energy X-ray and Gamma-Ray emissions have been shifted into the low-energy microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, and their distances are thus measured in tens of billions of light years!

By arraying together individual, sensitive radio telescopes, typically separated by thousands of miles, and simultaneously observing individual quasars, astronomers can create a “grid” of these distant objects that can then serve as the fundamental reference frame of the Universe. The technique of combining remote radio telescopes is called “Very Long Baseline Interferometry”, or VLBI. The combination of data from a VLBI network is accomplished at the U.S. Naval Observatory’s Mark-V Correlator Facility in Washington, DC. The reduced data not only determine the precise place of a quasar source, they also tell us the precise orientation of Earth’s rotational pole and the instantaneous speed of its spin at the time of the observation. Using the precise positions of some 212 quasars, the resulting reference grid is known as the International Celestial Reference Frame, or ICRF, maintained and continuously updated by astronomers at the Naval Observatory.

It is this reference frame which allows us to determine precise positions on the Earth and in space. For the proper calibration of the Global Positioning System we need to know exactly where the Earth is in inertial space. In Einstein’s theory of special relativity, there is no preferred inertial frame of reference, as motion must always be specified with respect to another object. Observations of quasars made on the Earth’s surface by radio telescopes determine this by referencing their positions and the Earth’s pole and meridian. Astronomers can use this reference frame to measure the positions and distances of nearby stars, more distant nebulae, and radio emitting sources across the galaxy. They can also use it to fly space probes to precise destinations around distant planets.

How does this help spacecraft to get to Mars? Interplanetary probes are in constant touch with the Earth through the NASA Deep-Space Network, a trio of tracking facilities each spaced roughly one-third of the way around the world. By observing a spacecraft’s radio beacon with two stations simultaneously, NASA trackers can pinpoint the probe’s position relative to the ICRF using the tiny Doppler shifts in the beacon’s carrier frequency, which can also be measured to determine the spacecraft’s speed relative to the Earth.

However, even tiny variations in the velocity of Earth’s rotation and the orientation of its rotational pole can introduce a significant uncertainty into the exact positions of the tracking antennas relative to the space probe. This uncertainty must be factored out in order to yield the most accurate positions and velocities.

According to the NASA Mars Exploration Rover website, in order to hit the precise point in Mars’ atmosphere to ensure a successful landing, the exact location of each of the Deep-Space Network’s tracking antennas needed to be known to a precision of better than 2 inches on the surface of the Earth relative to each lander. Any uncertainty in position greater than this could build over the distance between Earth and Mars, leading to a quarter-mile location error at the red planet. Hitting a precise landing site target that is scientifically interesting on Mars is thus nearly impossible unless the Earth’s current rotation rate is known to a timing precision of better than two ten-thousandths of a second! In October 2008, using the same technique, mission navigators successfully steered the $3 billion Cassini orbiter to a 16-mile close encounter with Enceladus, one of the small but fascinating ice moons of Saturn.

So, next time you make a trip across town in your car using GPS or navigate your way through the jumble of rings and moons around a distant planet like Saturn, thank the stars. They’re still the best guides to steer by.

End of podcast:

June 29th: Update from the 365 Days of Astronomy Team

kortney.hogan — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:00:40 +0000

Date: June 29, 2009

Title: Update from the 365 Days of Astronomy Team

Podcasters: Michael Koppelman, Pamela Gay, Nancy Atkinson, Stuart Lowe, Robert Simpson

Organization: 365 Days of Astronomy

Description: Michael, Pamela, Nancy, Stuart and Rob provide an update on the 365 Days of Astronomy.

Bio: Find Michael on Slacker Astronomy, Pamela on Astronomy Cast, Nancy at Universe Today, Stuart at Astronomy Blog and Rob at Orbiting Frog.

Today's sponsor:

Transcript:

Michael Koppelman: Hello and welcome again to the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast. It’s June 29, 2009 and the New Media working group/365 Days of Astronomy team is assembled to give you all a little bit of an update of what’s been going on on the podcast.

Most of you who are doing podcasts with us know Nancy Atkinson. She’s been coordinating sign-ups and the delivery of the podcasts. Nancy, how’s it been going?

Nancy Atkinson: It’s going really great. Our calendar is still technically completely full for the entire year. I just wanted to say how impressed we are with the quality of podcasts that everyone is producing. Thanks so much to everyone out there who is making the 365 Days of Astronomy podcasts such a successful part of the International Year of Astronomy.

That said however, we have had some issues with people dropping out. Most of the time people do let us know with some warning when they aren’t going to be able to deliver on their podcast. Other times they don’t however. Sometimes we just don’t hear from people. June was a particularly difficult month as we had about seven or eight people drop out. Thankfully there were some generous folks out there who volunteered to fill in on short notice.

We also were very happy to have some back-up podcasts, what we call emergency podcasts on hand that we’ve had submitted by people all around the world who kind of heeded our call back in March that we wanted to have some back-up podcasts available to use. Thanks to those brave souls who submitted a podcast without even having a set date. Right now we have about four back-up podcasts on hand but we still have over half the year to go.

If the first half was any indication of needing back-up podcasts to fill in last minute open dates, four won’t be anywhere near enough to get us through the rest of the year. We do know that things happen. Family issues or medical issues or just plain life happens issues and creating a podcast is no small commitment. If there is anyone out there who would still like to participate in this podcast contact us.

We can either put you on the waiting list or if you really want to help us out let us know that you’d like to submit a back-up podcast. We’ll give you all the information you need to take part.

Also just a repeat reminder for all the contributors, please get your podcast and transcript uploaded on time which means 30 days ahead of your scheduled air date. Things run so much smoother if everything is here on time.

On the whole, everyone is doing just a great job. It is so much fun to hear everyone’s interests and expertise in astronomy and space exploration. I thought I’d give you just a preview of a few things coming up in July.

We have the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. We have several podcasts on and around July 20th commemorating that event. That should be a fun way to celebrate that milestone.

Michael: Thanks a lot Nancy. Nancy is doing a tremendous amount of work for this project and really you should send her money on Pay Pal [laughter] or send her flowers or give her gift certificates to the iTunes store. Really it has been a tremendous amount of work, thank you Nancy.

Nancy: You bet, it is fun.

Michael: Emily Lakdawalla before Nancy was doing the same thing and sort of paved the way. Are we going to get Emily back the latter part of this year? Does anyone know?

Rob?: I hope so.

Dr. Pamela Gay: She will be coming back after maternity leave.

Michael: One of the interesting contentions with our little podcast is the theme song, half the people love it and exactly half the people are over it. To that end and for other logical reasons, we started a weekly podcast feed where we sort of put all seven shows from any given calendar week together into one podcast.

I don’t know how many of you are listening to the podcast feed. Actually maybe that’s a question for Stuart and Rob who put that feed together. Stuart, tell us about the weekly feed.

Stuart: Well as you’ve just said very early on in the year we realized that not everyone likes their astronomy in eight to ten minute chunks. Some people prefer more of an hour length at a time.

We created a weekly feed mostly done automatically by scripts on a computer and generated from the daily feed. I think quite a few people have been downloading it that way, haven’t they Rob?

Rob: Oh yes we have got nearly 11,000 downloads of the weekly shows since it started. We get about 300ish subscribers. The number kind of oscillates around that.

There are certainly people listening who prefer even larger chunks. I’m one of those incidentally. I have a one week sit down session with the 365 Days of Astronomy [laughter].

Stuart: So do I.

Michael: So you guys really made that feed for yourselves is what you’re saying.

Stuart: Pretty much.

Rob: It’s no offense to the theme song. I enjoy the theme song it’s just that every single day it was just a very short broadcast. I spend an hour walking every day to and from work so I kind of prefer to just save it all up and enjoy it at one go.

Stuart: It also means that I don’t have to listen to myself on the ____5:17 every day. [Laughter]

Michael: I like the weekly feed too. I generally listen to the podcast when I’m doing the dishes so I can get through maybe about three episodes. I have to choose between a weekly episode and hand-picking a few of the daily episodes. Choice, it’s all about choice people.

Stuart: Michael, how do the numbers compare on the daily feed? Three hundred on a weekly feed is what kind of a percentage of the total?

Michael: We’re still getting about 5,000 downloads a day of the daily feed. I think that the daily feed is still by far the most majority of our audience but the weekly feed is growing. It seems like it is trending upward while the daily feed is sort of flat.

I sort of thought that the daily feed would be growing but I might have mentioned this before, I think so many of us can’t listen every single day so on average there’s 5,000 a day.

Some people aren’t listening that day and other people are catching up that day kind of thing. In total we’re at about 620,000 downloads for the daily feed. Do you know the total downloads on the weekly feed?

Rob: It’s 10,700.

Michael: Cool.

Rob: That’s been going since February 10th so it is of a slightly different, but it seems like it is good to have the option.

Michael: Absolutely and it looks like we’re annualizing towards about 1.2 million downloads or something like that if we’re really half way. I guess we really are half way. But who knows, we might pick up some steam here in the second half of the year.

Rob: Yeah, especially with the moon landings; the anniversary of the moon landings, not the real landings. [Laughter]

Pamela: If people want to help get word out about our show, there are a lot of small things you can do. You can twitter about it. You can blog about it and just writing a review for us on iTunes will help get more people knowing what the show is all about and why you like it.

Michael: That reminds me too Pamela, we had someone write in and say wouldn’t it be nice if we pulled out some of the “best of’ or something like that. We’ve sort of been very agnostic in terms of really appreciating all the podcasts.

That doesn’t mean you out there dear listener couldn’t blog about your favorite podcast and you could think of that anyway you want. The best ones from each month, the best one from every topic, just the ones that appeal to you for some reason. There’s this huge quantity of content sitting out there now. Most podcasts don’t broadcast every day.

We have almost more astronomy audio content than a lot of people out there. There is a lot to choose from if you want to help us sort of pick out some of the gems that people should listen to.

Pamela, we are still getting inquires on sponsorships. Are we full up on the daily sponsorships and are there any other opportunities for sponsorships of the podcast?

Pamela: We’re almost filled up on the daily sponsorships. Last I looked we had under ten spots available. All because we fill up on the daily shows doesn’t mean you can’t still help us out. With our project there are a lot of things we’d like to do.

We’d like to get CDs that we can hand out to people. We’d like to keep going perhaps next year if we aren’t all exhausted and sick of each other come December. [Laughter] If you fund us now, that will help us make the decisions about what we can do next year.

If you’re a corporation looking to do something, if you’re an individual looking to help out, right now all you’re funding is two wonderful students holding this show together. All the rest of us that you’re hearing right now are donating our time. Your dollars are basically paying tuition costs for two undergrads.

Michael: I may have mentioned this last time but I just wanted people to know that our plan was not to solicit people for daily sponsorships. Originally we were going to have a couple large corporate sponsors that essentially sponsored the whole year but really I think that the unfortunate turn of luck sort of turned into a good thing.

We’re getting a lot of people sponsoring podcasts which is I think just making the podcast come up in conversation and get spread around a lot more than it would have if we had literally just one big or two big corporate sponsors. It’s a distributed podcast that’s user contributed and now we’re user contributed on the sponsorship side too and I think it’s great.

So, are we getting the bills paid Pamela?

Pamela: We’re getting all the bills paid so far. We’re halfway through the year and all of our technology so far has behaved. We’re using donated technology; donated time from us and two great kids are putting all of the effort into making the show possible.

Michael: If you do want to associate your company or your organization with the podcast you can try to get one of the few remaining daily sponsorships or just help sponsor us in sort of an overall way. We can list you on the website. We can mention your name on the air.

There are a lot of ways that we can sort of pay you back for your sponsorship through the word-of-mouth of this podcast. So, info@365daysofastronomy.org e-mail us and let us know if you can help out.

One last thing before we go. We have some very cool T-shirts with the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast logo on it. They’re available in a variety of sizes. We’ll ship them around the world. Head to our website: www.365daysofastronomy.org and go to the shop tab on the navigation and you can see the T-shirts and if you’re interested you can buy one.

All of our sponsorships and all of our “profits” from things like this go directly to supporting the podcast. This is a not-for-profit operation so support us in another way too and wear your 365 Days of Astronomy podcast T-shirt around.

This is Michael from Slacker Astronomy saying thank you all very much everybody for your participation and for listening. We’re only half way there so stick around.

Pamela: This is Pamela Gay from Astronomycast. Thanks for listening and keep downloading.

Stuart: This is Stuart from Astronomy Blog. Thanks everyone for listening and remember to check out the weekly show.

Robert Simpson: This is Robert Simpson from Orbiting Frog. Please keep contributing your podcasts and I’m enjoying them a lot.

Nancy: This is Nancy Atkinson from Universe Today and I just want to thank everybody for all their hard work.

Michael: Now let’s hear that song one more time and Stuart’s nice little outro credit thingey. In 3,2,1.

Stuart: It’s far; it’s far, far, far. [Laughter]

This transcript is not an exact match to the audio file. It has been edited for clarity. Transcription and editing by Cindy Leonard.

End of podcast:

June 28th: Space Travel in Science Fiction

kortney.hogan — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:00:20 +0000

Date: June 28, 2009

Title: Space Travel in Science Fiction

Podcaster: Vance Weaver

Organization: Its just little old me, Vance Weaver from Executive Painting and Texture
www.executivepainting.net

Description: In this edition of the 365 Days of Astronomy, enthusiast Vance Weaver of Executive Painting and Texture in Santa Clarita, California takes us on a journey through the universe as imagined in some of the great Science Fiction novels and movies. Space Travel in Science Fiction is looked at in stories such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek, and Dune, and includes SCI FI authors such as HG Wells, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Bio: Vance Weaver is a handyman and a painter in Santa Clarita, California. He studied math, science and astronomy in school.

Today's sponsor: This episode of 365 Days of Astronomy is sponsored by Joseph Brimacombe.

Transcript:

My name is Vance the handyman in Santa Clarita, Ca. I grew up reading every sort of Science Fiction novel I could get my hands on. I would read late into the night, trying to understand concepts like hyperspace, relativity, stellar evolution, artificial gravity, conservation of energy, F=ma and E=mc2.
The best science fiction has heroes traveling to distant stars or galaxies, shooting ray guns at evil creatures, fighting galactic wars, saving the Universe!

Some stories of space travel were written around the time of the American Civil War. Like Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon”, in which a group of adventurers launch themselves at the moon from a gigantic cannon.
But there is a much more ancient story of man’s dream of traveling to the stars.

In Greek Mythology, Icarus, and his father, Daedalus, build wings of wax and feathers to escape from the island of Crete and crazy king Minos. Daedalus warns Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, fearing the heat would melt the wax, and send them plunging to their deaths. Icarus, being a teenager and therefore knowing everything, ignores his father’s cautions. He was thrilled with the experience of flying, and kept going higher and higher. But as he got closer to the heat of the sun the wax began to melt, the feathers loosened and the wings fell apart. Icarus fell into the sea and drowned.

In H.G. Wells’ 1903 novel, “First Men in the Moon”, a pair of adventurers fashion a space craft out of a new material capable of blocking gravity waves. Not a bad trick for 1903, considering that in the year 2009 experiments to detect gravity waves are not yet conclusive. But in H.G. Wells’ imagination, blocking gravity waves propels the space craft away from the Earth, and the adventurers travel to the moon in only a few days.

I can’t think of any other SCI FI examples of space travel by blocking gravity waves. The most common method of science fiction space travel is by rocket. Who hasn’t seen the classic Buck Rodgers rocket with a pointy dart-like front end, a big smoky flame coming out of the back, and the string holding the rocket on course across the movie screen?.

There are a lot of flying saucers in SCI FI, too. Flying saucers show up in movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still, Plan 9 from Outer Space, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Mars Attacks, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Independence Day. These space ships come zipping into our solar system on trajectories impossible for comets to achieve, and either land in New York City, or crash into a remote valley disguised as a meteorite. Often these flying saucers are enormous, city sized leviathans. Their occupants look like anything from your average business man to spaghettified grey men with dark mirrored sunglasses, and they either offer to save mankind from himself, or they make short work of our military in preparation to conquering the world.

Rockets and space ships in Science Fiction evolve alongside real science. In movies today you get a fusion powered, scaffold-looking space ship being pushed through space by a glowing bank of gargantuan ion jets.

But science, or at least engineering, has also tried to keep pace with Science Fiction. Today, real spacecraft are being designed to cruise the solar system using real ion engines. NASA’s Deep Space 1 was launched in 1998, and used Xenon gas as its fuel source. DS1 accelerated xenon ions up to 88,000 mph out of the business end of the space craft’s ion engine for almost 2 years. That equates to, let’s see: xenon has 54 protons, atomic mass 131.29, 88,000 mph, carry the 4…yeah, that creates a thrust of 0.02 pounds, roughly the force of a sheet of paper resting on the palm of your hand. Doesn’t sound like much, but DS1 achieved a top speed of just under 8,000 mph over the course of its mission.

And as for bigger and better rockets for cruising the interstellar space lanes, there are a couple of ideas that have been conceived in science, popularized in SCI FI, and may one day be brought to life. One such example is the Bussard Ramjet, proposed in 1960 by American Nuclear Physicist, Dr. Robert W. Bussard, and further developed in SCI FI by such authors as Larry Niven, and Poul Anderson. The idea is to scoop up all the hydrogen atoms you can that are floating around in space, funnel them into a fusion reactor, and accelerate them out the back end as propellant at relativistic speeds.

According to Dr. Bussard, such a drive could accelerate a space craft to greater than 70% of light speed in less than a year. That could put a man (or a robot) in orbit around the nearest stellar companion to the sun, Proxima Centauri, a mere 4.2 light years away, in less than one life time.

But people flitting about the universe in science fiction need more than just raw power and faster rockets. The universe is unimaginably huge, and Einstein gave us a maximum speed limit that we can never exceed. The nearest planet of interest might be millions or billions of light years away. It could take more time than the universe has been in existence to get to the plot of some science fiction stories if it were not for alternative means of space travel.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. David Bowman escapes from HAL, the deranged computer, abandons his spaceship, and is pulled into a monolith on the surface of Iapetus, the 3rd moon of Saturn. The monolith is really a portal to a sort of Grand Central Station of the Universe, located in a star system far away from the Milky Way Galaxy. Bowman observes spacecraft from other space faring species popping out of one portal, and diving into another, crossing the universe without trekking the countless light years by using this interstellar switching station.

“Wait a minute,” you’re saying. “Iapetus? In 2010, the sequel to 2001, the abandoned space ship was in orbit around Io, the 5th moon of Jupiter and the 1st Galilean Satellite.” Well, that’s right. In the forward to 2010, Arthur C. Clarke apologetically explains that there was just too much good stuff we had learned from Voyager about the moons of Jupiter to leave the spaceship in orbit near Saturn, including active volcanoes on Io, and possibly ice covered oceans on Europa. If there could be water on Europa, it became plausible that extraterrestrial life might have evolved there. He retroactively moved the location from the 1st book, in one of SCI FI’s great examples of keeping up with real science. Proposals have since been made to place robotic submarines on Europa to search for life. But a note of caution there: in the course of the 2010 novel, we are warned that humans are not allowed to visit Europa. Life that has formed there is not to be contacted or disturbed. It’s all part of the alien’s plan to nudge life out of the primitive, and into the scientific age – just like they did for us in the prologue of 2001. Hooray for alien benefactors!

In Dune, created by Frank Herbert, Interplanetary Space Travel is accomplished by another sort of short cut - folded space… Traveling through folded space is comparable to finding the shortest path between 2 points on a piece of paper. If a piece of paper represents the 3 dimensional universe, the shortest distance between those points is a straight line…unless the paper is folded such that the 2 points touch each other through a higher dimension. In Dune, Spacing Guild Navigators fold the paper (or the universe) and pilot the ship across the fold to their destination.

One can think of this folded higher dimensional space as hyperspace. Today, String Theory predicts that there are a whole bunch of extra, or “Hyperspacial” dimensions. Not just the 3 dimensions that we’re all familiar with, not just the 4 dimensions of Albert Einstein’s space-time, but 10 dimensions, 11 dimension, maybe even 21 dimensions. I can’t keep on top of the number of dimensions predicted by String Theory. But travel through some form of Hyperspace has become a popular solution to many a science fiction story.

In the original Star Trek TV series, the starship Enterprise frequently zooms about the galaxy at Warp Speed. How this is supposed to work is somewhat disputed by fans and enthusiasts, but essentially the Warp Drive creates a bubble of Hyperspace around the spaceship. The ship is driven at essentially faster than light speed through this Warp Bubble by contracting space in the front of the bubble, making the distance traveled to the destination shorter, and therefore the equivalent speed through 4 dimensional space-time much faster.

Another fantastic method of travel in Star Trek is the Transporter. You step into the transporter, and your molecules are disassembled, teleported to some distant location, and reassembled again - hopefully in the right sequence.

But Star Trek was not the first movie in which a teleportation device was used. There have been several creative descriptions of beaming disassembled molecules through space. One of my favorites is the classic 1958 Vincent Price movie, “The Fly.”

In The Fly, a scientist experiments with a matter transporter, with which he is able to teleport objects across a short distance, but which he believes will revolutionize transportation. When he decides to test it on himself, he accidentally mixes his own molecules with that of a fly and becomes a horrible creature with a fly’s head and arm. “Help me…”

In “The Sirens of Titan”, Kurt Vonnegut describes Chrono Synclastic Infundibula as "those places in space and time where all the different kinds of truths fit together. When characters enter the Infundibula, they become "wave phenomena", somewhat akin to probability waves encountered in quantum mechanics. They exist a long a spiral stretching from our Sun to the star Betelgeuse. When a planet, such as the Earth, or Mars, or Mercury, intersects this spiral, the characters temporarily materialize on that planet.

Kurt Vonnegut didn’t care much for the details of the science, but Chrono Synclastic Infundibula sounds eerily like the multi-dimensional universe of String Theory. Vonnegut’s description of “Chrono Synclastic Infundibula” is pretty illusive and esoteric, and some would criticize his authenticity as a SCI FI author since it is not based on any current theory of cosmology. But come on - how many people really have a handle on String Theory, General Relativity, …

So the next time the Millennium Falcon engages the Hyperdrive and zooms off into the stars, remember, its only Science Fiction. Its not real…yet

End of podcast:

June 27th: Cries From the Infant Universe

kortney.hogan — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:00:26 +0000

Date: June 27, 2009

Title: Cries From the Infant Universe

Podcaster: Richard Drumm

Links: For more information on this topic link to Dr. Whittle's home page at UVa: http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~dmw8f/
From here you can link to The Teaching Company site where you can order the 6 DVD set titled "Cosmology: The History and Nature of Our Universe" which features Dr. Whittle lecturing extensively on the subject. At the UVa site you can also download the sound files heard here, PowerPoint presentations and much more. The December 3rd podcast will have more from Dr. Whittle on the CMB.

Description: One of the most impressive developments in modern cosmology has been the measurement and analysis of the tiny fluctuations seen in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation -- the omni-directional wall of hot glowing gas which dates from when the universe was only 400,000 years old.

Bio: Richard Drumm is President of the Charlottesville Astronomical Society and President of 3D - Drumm Digital Design, a video production company with clients such as Kodak, Xerox and GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals. He was an observer with the UVa Parallax Program at McCormick Observatory in 1981 & 1982. He's found that his greatest passion in life is public outreach astronomy and he pursues it at every opportunity.

Today's sponsor: This episode of 365 Days of Astronomy is brought to you by NRAO.

Transcript:

RBD:
And thank you again to George Hrab for that wonderful musical introduction. If you don't listen to the Geologic Podcast yet, why, you should! Hello, I'm Richard Drumm, President of the Charlottesville Astronomical Society here in Charlottesville, Virginia, with Professor Mark Whittle of the University of Virginia Astronomy Department. Hello Dr. Whittle!

MW:
Hello, Richard!

RBD:
Tell me, astronomers have been studying the microwave background, the CMB or CMBR for almost 40 years now, what exactly is it and why is it so darned interesting?

MW:
I think a good way to begin to look at what the microwave background is, is to remember this fantastic privilege, I suppose that astronomers have, which is that they're able to see history directly. Simply by looking very far away you're inherently looking back in time because it takes so long for the light to cross the universe from distant objects.

So if you look 14 billion light years away you're looking back in time 14 billion years. What you see when you look 14 billion light years away is the big bang itself, and so all around us then in a sort of 360 degree panorama at enormous distance sits this big bang image.

And of course, I've just used the word image there, so one wants to know well, 'What did the big bang look like?' and one of its defining characteristics is that it was incredibly bright. In fact, in a way, a better term would be the big flash rather than the big bang.

In the 14 year journey that the light waves have taken to cross space during that trip they've been stretched by a factor of 1,000 because the universe is also expanding. So they started out as light with a wavelength around 1 micron, a millionth of a meter, and if they've been stretched 1,000 times they arrive at a thousandth of a meter or a millimeter. Now that's actually in the microwave part of the spectrum.

So the cosmic microwave background is our vision of the birth of the universe. And to be strictly accurate, it's actually a time about 400,000 years after the big bang itself.

[2:31]
RBD:
And so the WMAP image-and if you go to Google/images and type in WMAP you'll see this oval with green and yellow splatters on it, that is, basically it's our baby picture!

MW:
Yes, and that immediately tells you why astronomers are so interested in looking at the microwave background. It's 400,000 years after the big bang. There were no structures like stars or galaxies, there was an incredibly uniform, hot glowing gas. And there was a very, very slight texture or roughness to it, regions of slightly higher and lower density and pressure and temperature.

It contains a great deal of information and it will determine in large part how the universe of galaxies and stars will then ultimately grow and form. And it also contains information that comes from a much earlier time, in fact the launching mechanism itself.

[3:30]
RBD:
I suppose with a name like 'the big bang' that with that word 'bang' in it, that it would be some sort of sound involved in it. If that was the case, what would it have sounded like had we been there at the time and had a really good spacesuit?

MW:
Yes, yes, you would need a good spacesuit because back at that time about 400,000 years after the big bang you would have been incinerated in probably a few seconds. It's basically a bit like diving a few kilometers into the Sun's atmosphere, it's very, very bright from all directions, you actually...

[4:04]
RBD: Rather uncomfortable!

MW:
Yes. Of course 'an explosion' is a bit of a misnomer for the big bang, And the reason explosions are loud is because they send outwards a pressure wave so it's an expansion into a pre-existing gas or atmosphere. Of course the big bang is different from that, it's and expansion OF space with all its contents. It's not moving into anything, it's just an expansion of space itself with matter and energy embedded within it.

So, ironically, the big bang itself was pure silence. By the time of 400,000 years indeed, sound had developed, and there was quite a cacophony. And one way of viewing the patches on the microwave background is as the peaks and troughs of sound waves.

The waves are actually very long, they're many thousands of light years, and so they correspond to frequencies, pitch which is very, very low by human standards, roughly 50 octaves below human ears. But nonetheless actually you can shift them up in pitch by the 50 octaves and put them into the human audio, audible range.

You can actually recreate this sound, and so let's play it, here's just 10 seconds of the sound.

[5:25]
RBD:
OK

[Sound #1]

MW:
So, it's, it's sort of a raw, deep roaring sound. And in fact, our ears aren't able to quite pick up out of that sound what is really quite an interesting sound spectrum. If you analyze all the different frequencies present, then you generate a thing called a sound, sound spectrum, you can think of it a bit like a light spectrum so it's intensity versus wavelength, in this case it's wavelengths corresponding to pitch.

When you do that, when you analyze the number of different waves present, long, medium and short, you find quite a remarkable sound spectrum shape. In fact, it looks like a cross between noise and a musical instrument. There's actually musicality present in the sound.

[6:22]
RBD:
The "Music of the Spheres!"

MW:
It's funny that it evokes that, you know, important historical term "The Music of the Spheres" that of course was linked to the solar system and the orbits of the planets and their various ratios. This, in this case it's actually a natural process in the early universe which leads to the presence of certain wavelengths being stronger than other wavelengths.

And so there are, actually a fundamental and harmonics are also present, just as you would get if you took the sound spectrum of a musical instrument. There's a primary tone and then a higher set of roughly equally spaced harmonics.

If we follow the sound forward in time a rather wonderful thing occurs, which is that in a sense the peaks of the sound waves gradually turn into the first generation of stars, while the troughs in the sound waves evacuate out and become the gaps between stars. The stars then, of course, gather ultimately to make galaxies.

So the current universe that we now find ourselves in is a sort of relic of this acoustic era. Recently the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and also the Australian group, the 2 degree field survey, have just mapped out the position of about a million galaxies over a region about 2 billion light years in radius.

And so these galaxies are not spread about uniformly, they actually make a fascinating, weblike pattern. But etched in that pattern if you analyze that a little bit like you analyze the microwave background, you can see that fundamental and harmonics still present sort of etched in the pattern of galaxies.

[8:18]
RBD:
What kind of things have we learned by studying the cosmic sounds, and how is that done?

MW:
So it's actually very easy to sort of see the basic approach here. The sound that any object makes tells you really about the nature of the object. So I'm going to actually hit two objects here...
[ding]
And here's the second one.
[clink]

RBD:
Quite different, yes!

MW:
So they're quite different, and even if you were not here looking at these objects I'm going to guess you could probably tell the first one was a wine glass and the second was just a mug, a cup. And so if you took a sound spectrum, and if you were knowledgeable about the way in which objects vibrate you infer the size and shape of both of those two objects.

And it's exactly the same with the cosmic sound. If you listen, or in fact just analyze the sound spectrum, you can tell what the structure and properties of the universe are. Perhaps the most important contributions that the microwave background's made is to measure using the tone, using the basic pitch of that cosmic sound, measure the geometry of the space.

And it turns out to, delightfully, that the space is, has the geometry that we all learned at high school, which is Euclidean geometry.

[9:44]
RBD:
Oh good!

MW:
It's the geometry that you do on a flat piece of paper, and in fact in that case the angles inside a triangle do add up to 180.

RBD:
Thank you, Dr. Whittle, for making all this crystal clear!

MW:
You're very welcome, Richard, that was, thank you for interviewing me.
[10:03]

End of podcast:

June 26th: Palomar Transient Factory - a new sky survey taking place at Palomar Observatory

kortney.hogan — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:00:25 +0000

Date: June 26, 2009

Title: Palomar Transient Factory - a new sky survey taking place at Palomar Observatory

Podcaster: Scott Kardel

Organization: Palomar Observatory
http://palomar-observatory.org

Description: The Palomar Transient Factory combines a large digital camera, a high-speed data network, and intelligent computing in a unique way that will uncover secrets of the universe in a new way, giving astronomers a deep look at the variable sky.

Bio: Scott Kardel received his MS in Astronomy from the University of Arizona and his BS in Physical Science / Secondary Education from Northern Arizona University. For the last two and a half decades he has been working to bring an understanding of science and the universe to a wide range of audiences. In 2003 he became the Palomar Observatory's first full-time person devoted to public outreach. There he works to bring Palomar's rich history and story of exploration on the road and on the Net to a wide variety of groups throughout Southern California and beyond.

Today's sponsor: This episode of "365 Days of Astronomy" is sponsored by the American Astronomical Society, the major organization for professional astronomers in North America, whose members remind everyone that One Sky Connects Us All. Find out more or join the AAS at aas.org.

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to another edition of the 365 Days of Astronomy podcasts. I am Scott Kardel of the Palomar Observatory.

Back in February I told you about some older sky surveys that have been taking place at Palomar. Now I want to tell you about a new sky survey. It is an innovative new sky survey has begun returning images that will detect an unprecedented number of supernovae and variable stars and may soon reveal new classes of astronomical objects. It’s known as the Palomar Transient Factory and it combines the power of a wide-field telescope, a high-resolution camera, high performance networking and computing, and rapid follow-up with telescopes around the globe in a new way that will allow astronomers to find things as never before. The survey has already found eleven supernovae and soon much of the work will happen robotically, without human intervention.

The Palomar Transient Factory is a collaboration of scientists and engineers from around the world and it works like this: the automated wide-angle 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope at Caltech's Palomar

Observatory scans the skies using a 100-megapixel camera. The flood of images, more than 100 gigabytes every night, is beamed off of the mountain via microwave to the Internet where it rapidly makes its way to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Computers at Berkeley analyze the data and compare it to previous images obtained at Palomar. Further computers using a form of artificial intelligence software sift through the results to identify the most new and interesting “transient” sources—basically anything that is seen to vary in brightness or position. As each new candidate transient is identified, instructions and coordinates are sent to perform follow-up observations using the Palomar 60-inch telescope and others. Generally this happens within minutes of the transient’s discovery. Soon all of this will be completely automated, including deciding which transients are interesting enough for a second look. As follow-up observations indicate that new candidate transient detections show promise, the most interesting candidates are brought to the attention of astronomers from the Palomar Transient Factory member institutions: Caltech, UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkley National Laboratories, Columbia University, Las Cumbres Observatory, Weizmann Institute of Science, and The University of Oxford. Finally, an astronomer gets into the act by performing detailed follow-up observations using telescopes such as Palomar's 200-inch Hale Telescope, one of the Keck Telescopes in Hawaii, or others around the world.

Palomar Transient Factory is designed to search for a wide variety of transient sources with characteristic timescales ranging from minutes to months, giving astronomers one of their deepest and most comprehensive explorations of the universe in the time domain.

The Palomar Transient Factory survey, because it looks for anything changing in the sky, covers a vast variety of different astronomical targets. The wide range of the survey extends across the entire universe.

Astronomers expect to discover everything from near-Earth asteroids to stars exploding millions of light years away. Much of the survey's time is spent searching for Type-Ia supernovae. These supernovae, formed from the explosion of a class of dead star known as a white dwarf, are very useful to astronomers because they can be used to tell the distance to galaxies located across the universe. Those distances allow astronomers to probe the origin, structure, and even the ultimate fate of the universe. By operating more rapidly than previous surveys, Palomar Transient Factory will also detect objects of a completely different nature such as pulsating stars, many different types of stellar explosions, and possibly even planets that orbit other stars. Finally, there is always the possibility of the unknown. Palomar Transient Factory's radical new survey techniques have raised astronomers' expectations of finding new, unexpected astronomical objects.

Caltech's Nicholas Law, project scientist for Palomar Transient Factory, tells me that no one has looked on these timescales with this sensitivity before and that it’s entirely possible, and he thinks even likely, that they will find new astronomical objects never before seen by humans.

The quantity and quality of the new data that’s been coming in are absolutely mind blowing for astronomers working in this field. On one recent night PTF patrolled a section of the sky about five times the size of the Big Dipper and found eleven new objects. I was talking recently to Caltech's Robert Quimby, a postdoctoral scholar and leader of the Palomar Transient Factory software team, and he mentioned to me that he had found five new supernovae before breakfast that morning. Compare that to the previous survey had worked on where he found 30 supernovae in two years.

Images and more information on the PTF survey are available on the PTF website at http://www.astro.caltech.edu/ptf/.

PTF is a five-year international collaboration of astronomers and engineers from the California Institute of Technology, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, University of California at Berkeley, Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, The University of Oxford, Columbia University, the Weizmann Institute of Science, and the Pennsylvania State University. The High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network provides Palomar Observatory’s high-speed data connection.

Stay tuned for a future podcast when we’ll be discussing some of the results that have been coming in from Palomar Transient Factory. For Palomar Observatory this is Scott Kardel wishing you “clear skies”.

End of podcast:

June 25th: Galileo’s Telescope

kortney.hogan — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:00:46 +0000

Date: June 25, 2009

Title: Galileo's Telescope

Podcaster: The Adler Planetarium

Organization: The Adler Planetarium

Description: In 1609 when Galileo Galilei had fine-tuned his new instrument and turned it toward the night sky he revolutionized modern science. How great of an impact has his invention had on modern science and how did his discoveries change the way that we look at the night sky?

Bio: The Adler Planetarium — America's First Planetarium — was founded in 1930 by Chicago business leader Max Adler. The museum is home to three full-size theaters, including the all-digital projection Definiti® Space Theater, the Sky Theater which utilizes a Zeiss optical projector, and the Universe 3D Theater. It is also home to one of the world's most important antique instrument collections. The Adler is a recognized leader in science education, with a focus on inspiring young people, particularly women and minorities, to pursue careers in science.

Today's sponsor: This episode of 365 Days of Astronomy is brought to you by Joseph Brimacombe.

Transcript:

Nancy
Welcome to a special edition of the Adler Planetarium’s Bi-weekly podcast, Adler Night and Day. The Adler Night and Day podcast provides listeners with a glimpse of what you can see in the night sky, as well as updates on recent solar weather and riveting conversation. For the 365 days of Astronomy, daily podcast of the IYA, we’ll be concentrating on the riveting conversation!
Without further ado, I’m your host Nancy…
Mark 

And I’m Mark, and today we’re joined on Adler Night and Day by Dr. Michael Smutko of the Adler Planetarium. Welcome Mike...

Mike
Thanks for having me, it’s great to be back!

Mark
Yah, it’s good to have you!
Well, today we’re going to talk about Galieo. We're celebrating the International Year of Astronomy, which is commemorating the 400th anniversary of Galileo's use of the telescope to study the skies. The common misconception is that he actually invented the telescope, what's the story there?

Mike
Well, part of the reason there’s a misconception that Galileo invented the telescope, is that Galileo sold that story himself. Uh, the real truth is that the telescope was invented by the Dutch in at least 1608, in fact there was a patent application for a telescope by a Dutchman named Hans Lippershey in 1608. However, the next year in 1609, Galileo had heard about this and figured out how to make his own telescope and actually improved upon the Dutch design without ever actually having one of his own. So, Galileo really did progress things along but to say that he’s the inventor of the telescope is a bit of a stretch.

Nancy
Many people regard Galileo as the father of modern science, do you feel that that’s a title he earned rightly?

Mike
Well, prior to Galileo’s time, scientists or philosophers and mathematicians would just defer to the experts. People would say that Galileo and Euclid and the classics of Greek philosophy were just so much smarter than we could be today that there was no point in thinking about it ourselves. Ya know, if Aristotle said it was true, it must be true. Galileo really broke with that idea by saying, ya know, Hey, Aristotle, ya he was smart, but he wasn’t perfect and we should test things out and see if balls really do fall down like Aristotle said or maybe it behaves differently.

Mark
Well, Galileo wasn’t the first astronomer um, there were others before him. What did his observations do that made them special, that advanced science?

Mike
Well, Galileo lived at really a magic time the Copernican idea that the Earth is not the center of the universe had been out for a while but it was lacking in observational evidence which was what Galileo was trying to profess was the important thing in science. And Galileo, while he did not invent the telescope, he gets credit for being one of the first people to turn it up to the night sky and write about what he saw. And some of the things that he saw with his early telescope was just really stuff that no one had ever seen before. He discovered moons around Jupiter. He discovered that the moon wasn’t just some flat circle in the sky but that it was 3D, that it had mountains and valleys just like the Earth does and so hey, maybe the moon is a similar kind of place like the Earth and isn’t this magical, heavenly thing. Um, perhaps most importantly he discovered that the planet Venus went through phases just like the moon does and the reason that that’s so important is because in the old system, the Earth-centered system, Aristotle and Ptolemy, the phases of Venus that, it was impossible to have the phases of Venus that Galileo actually saw. You need to have a sun-centered uh, solar system in order to reproduce the phases of Venus that Galileo saw. So, Galileo took this as some of the first, the best and the first, evidence that Copernicus was actually right.

Mark
Well, that’s pretty important.

Nancy
Well, and for all these great observations and writings though, he actually got into quite a bit of trouble in his time. I mean, why, in his time, was he not the great astronomer and scientist that we think of him as today?

Mike
Well, Galileo was a very polarizing personality. He was, he was a showman, uh, he was a smart guy and he knew it, and he loved telling you how smart he was and how stupid you were in comparison to his great intellect. So, he won lots of admirers and he also made lots of enemies along the way. And part of the reason that Galileo got into so much trouble with the Catholic church was not so much a difference of religion vs. science that it’s played up to be today. But rather that he just, he just offended the wrong people. One of the disputes, on of the arguments that people made against Copernicus was saying that, well, the bible says in certain places that the Sun stood still in the sky and so that means that the Sun must be moving and the Earth must be at rest. And Galileo would say, well no, it’s just the way it was written, it’s the interpretation, ya know. What the problem is that right around this time was also right after Martin Luther, the Thirty Years War was in full swing at this point, and for someone to who was Catholic in Italy to say that the Church was wrong in this regard and the bible doesn’t really mean what it was literally said in the words. That really got Galileo into a lot of trouble. It wasn’t so much that the Sun is at the center and that Copernicus was right but the way that Galileo went around doing it, saying, hey ya know think for yourself. Interpret the bible the way that you want to do it. It didn’t go well in Rome.

Mark
Well, these uh, revolutionary observations uh, really kind of created a whole new way to observe the night sky did other astronomers jump on the bandwagon immediately?

Mike
Well, not immediately, it was a steady path of progress. Galileo improved telescopes over the course of his life. Uh, his first telescope only had a magnification of about three times, but he improved on that to a factor of about thirty or so by the end of his life. Other astronomers have followed suit since then, telescopes have been getting bigger and bigger and larger in diameter and longer in length to gather more light and also increase their magnifications. And today, the really big breakthroughs are coming not from visible light, the light that our eyes can see, but light in other wavelengths, radio wave lengths, x-ray wave lengths, ultraviolet wavelengths, and all these other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum where there’s lots and lots of science, lots and lots of great information. But just that our eyes are not sensitive to. So that’s really where I think that the next be wave of discoveries is going to come. Uh, in these wavelengths that our eyes can’t see, that today’s instruments can.

Nancy
And we look forward to having you back on the show when we get more information! (Laughs)

Mike
Well, I look forward to coming back!

Nancy
Nice, well thank you for joining us today on this very special edition of Adler Night and Day.

Mark
Yes, thanks you, Mike!

Mike
My pleasure.

Nancy
I’d also like to thank the listeners of the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast. To listen to full episode of Adler Night and Day and subscribe to the series and podcast, please visit www.adlerplanetarium.org/podcasts.

End of podcast:

June 24th: Telescopes for Schools

kortney.hogan — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:00:24 +0000

Date: June 24, 2009

Title: Telescopes for Schools

Podcaster: The Society for Popular Astronomy

Organization: The Society for Popular Astronomy

Description: To celebrate the International Year of Astronomy, the Society for Popular Astronomy in the UK thought it would be a great idea to be able to give free telescopes to schools throughout the UK. This show tells the story of how it was done, funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, and how the scheme is working out.

Bio: The Society for Popular Astronomy was formed in 1953 as the Junior Astronomical Society, and now has about 3000 members, mostly in the UK. It aims to help beginners to astronomy, through its magazine Popular Astronomy and its unique News Circulars.

Today's sponsor: This episode of 365 Days of Astronomy is brought to you by The Society for Popular Astronomy.

Transcript:

Hello. I'm Robin Scagell of the Society for Popular Astronomy.

Wouldn't it be great if every school child had the chance to look through a telescope at the Moon and planets, like these pupils from Swakeleys School in Hillingdon:

We are going to...talk about our experience ...using a telescope. Firstly I thought it was hard to focus and try and get what we wanted, but as we got used to it, it got easier. We saw mountains and craters of the Moon. And we took some pictures using a digital camera as well. It came out really good.

Most kids, in the UK at least, never do get the chance to look through a telescope. Although astronomy is on the National Curriculum, it's entirely based on descriptions of what's up there. Yet as astronomers we know what a fantastic sight the Moon can be through even a small telescope. It can hook you for life. And as we know, astronomy is a great way to learn about science. It covers so many aspects, yet it's fun and still has the element of discovery about it.

At a time when fewer and fewer children are taking up science as a career, it seems to us that we really ought to be getting more schoolchildren interested in astronomy. By 'us' we mean the Society for Popular Astronomy, one of the UK's largest national astronomical societies. We began life in 1953 as the Junior Astronomical Society, to provide a way for beginners to the subject to find their feet before progressing to more advanced societies such as the British Astronomical Association. Our appeal was largely to young people, but also to adults who were starting out in the hobby. Then by 1994 we found that many young people didn't like the idea of being called 'junior', and weren't joining societies anyway, while older people were also put off by the name. So we changed to the Society for Popular Astronomy, in keeping with the name of our magazine, Popular Astronomy.

When we met to discuss what we would do to mark the International Year of Astronomy, the goal of getting telescopes into schools seemed a distant one. Who would pay for them, when school budgets are already spoken for? Would hard-pressed schoolteachers be keen enough to use them, given that practical astronomy inevitably means after-school sessions? How would we help them to use the telescope and construct lessons, particularly for those who had never used a telescope themselves?

We raised the topic at IYA steering group meetings. We were very pleased to find that our ideas were getting the approval of professional astronomers, also concerned at the lack of astronomy teaching in schools. We managed to source a telescope from the Far East that could be imported and distributed for a reasonable price -- a basic 70 mm refractor on altazimuth mount. With the backing of professional colleagues, we approached the UK's science funding body, the Science and Technology Facilities Council, STFC. To our delight, they agreed with us that this was a worthwhile project, and in fact it became one of the UK's major IYA initiatives. They were particularly keen that telescopes should go out to secondary schools, that is for children over the age of 11, because while many kids are excited by astronomy when they're younger, they often lose interest in science when they are at the crucial career-decision-making stages between 11 and 14.

One thing we didn't know was how many telescopes would be needed. There are something like 4000 secondary schools in the UK. We took our telescope to science fairs and asked for feedback. Would it be too much to hope that 1000 of the schools would want a telescope? The feedback was positive, so that's the figure we aimed for.

STFC agreed to come up with the sum of £50,000, which is about US$75,000, just enough for 1000 telescopes. But what about the other problems -- helping school teachers make use of them? Here, the Royal Astronomical Society came to the rescue. They funded a DVD which could be sent out with the telescopes, which covers everything from scratch. It's got a step-by-step description of setting up the telescope, explains the all-important stages of first aligning the finder telescope, and warns against trying to use high powers too soon -- all the things that beginners get wrong.

We also recorded interviews with various professional and amateur astronomers, both to give children a flavour of what professional astronomers do and what they can see through the telescope. There are lesson plans and star maps, all in all making what we hope is a really useful package to help teachers get started.

The SPA itself also dug into its own funds to help the project. One of the things we've done is to create a new part of our website entirely devoted to the Moon. This is because the Moon is by far the easiest object for people to observe with a small telescope. It's also one of the few astronomical objects that can be seen from city skies just as well as from the country. It can even be seen during daylight! If you go to www.popastro.com/moonwatch, you'll find masses of information about the Moon, how it got there and even its influence on human culture. There's also an interactive Moon map, which has been annotated by the pupils of Moorside High School in Stoke-on-Trent. Just hover your mouse over the feature you want to know about and you'll find its name and diameter. There are hundreds of craters and other features already labelled.

The telescopes were distributed free of charge in February, and are already being put to use. In March we held the first of several Moonwatches, when the Moon was at its best and could be observed high in the sky. Other weeks are due to follow in the autumn. To get the kids out there observing, the SPA is sponsoring a competition for the best illustration of the Moon, either made using the telescope or showing how the telescope is being put to use, which runs until the end of the year. But what do the kids themselves think of their first view of the Moon through the telescope?

Hello, and what's your name?
My name's Katherine.

What form are you in?
8HG.

What did you think of going and seeing the Moon on the Moonwatch?
It was really interesting and I really enjoyed myself.

Hello, and what's your name?
Emma.

And what form are you in?
8SR

What did you think of going and seeing the Moon at the Moonwatch?
It was very interesting and I learned a lot, and I saw Saturn and its rings and the Moon up close with all its craters and I saw this really big... clump of stars.

So, it can be done. We'll have to wait for some time to find out the legacy of the scheme. But maybe we'll eventually get to hear, perhaps in many years time, a leading scientist -- or maybe even a lunar astronaut -- say that the thing that changed their life was their first view of the Moon through one of our telescopes.

End of podcast: