Just when you think you understand it, light will do some amazing things. Just look at the discovery of lasers, and their use in almost every technology you can think of: from cutting, to transmittin...
Mars gets all the attention, but you might be surprised to know how much Venus has been explored. From initial telescope observations and the early flyby missions, to the landers… yes landers and orb...
Last week we talked about the orbiter portion of the Viking Missions. But that was only half the adventure. Each Viking spacecraft carried a lander as well, which touched down on the surface of Mars,...
Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity get all the news now, but it was NASA’s Viking Missions that gave us our first close up view of the surface of Mars. These twin missions, both made of orbiter ...
When it comes to telescopes, astronomers really just care about resolution: how much can you see? Your resolution defines how much science you can get done, and it depends on your gear, wavelength, a...
Hydrogen is the most common element in the Universe, formed at the beginning of everything in the Big Bang. It’s the raw material of stars, gathering together through mutual gravity into vast n...
Light can do some pretty strange stuff, like pass through objects and bounce off them; it can be broken up and recombined. In fact, everything we “see” is actually the end result of refle...
Next time a kid asks you, why is the sky blue? Answer them: because of Rayleigh scattering. If they’re not happy with that answer, feel free to expand based on the knowledge we’re about t...
Quantum theory is plenty strange, but one of the strangest discoveries is the realization that there’s a limit to how much you can measure at any one time. This was famously described by Werner...
Have you ever looked into the sky and noticed a fuzzy blob? That’s a Messier Object, carefully cataloged by Charles Messier to make it easier to find comets. We’ll learn about the history...
Accuracy, precision and reproducibility. These are the foundations of science that make our progress possible. How do these play into a scientist’s daily activities? And just how precise can we...
You’ve probably all heard of Schrödinger’s Cat, that strange thought experiment designed by Erwin Schrödinger to show how the strange predictions of quantum theory could impact the real w...
Time for another detailed look at a constellation; one of the most fascinating in the sky, but hidden to most of the northern hemisphere: Carina. Home to one of the most likely supernova candidates w...
This is going to be one of the “how we know what we know” kind of shows. How do scientist determine the age of things? How do we know the age of everything from stone tools, to the age of...
The number of moons, the age of the Sun, and our placement in the Milky Way all had an impact on the formation of the Earth and the evolution of life on our planet. But what if things were different?...
Our lives are ruled by calendars. And calendars are ruled by astronomy. As we near the end of 2011, and get ready to ring in the new year, let’s discover the astronomy underlying the days, week...
If you want to see one of the strangest places in the Solar System, look no further than Io, Jupiter’s inner Galilean moon. The immense tidal forces from Jupiter keep the moon hotter than hot, ...
On June 30th, 1908 “something” exploded over the Tunguska region of Siberia, flattening thousands of square kilometres of forest, and unleashing a force that rivalled the most powerful nu...
When you hear of a looming asteroid strike, do you wonder what to do? Should you go into your underground bunker, evacuate the state, or leave the planet? Fortunately, astronomers have developed the ...
Time for part 3 of our tour through the hobby of astrophotography. You’ve set up your gear, taken some clear images. Now we’re going to help you turn that raw data into the kind of amazin...
In the first episode, we talked about the gear you’ll need for your expensive astrophotography hobby. This week we continue our discussion, and talk about the techniques you’ll use to get...
No matter how good your telescope is, you’re never going to see the same detail and colours as the photographs. To take amateur astronomy to the next level, you really need to attach a camera t...
The Sun looks like a harmless burning ball of fire in the sky: warm, life-giving and forever unchanging. But we know better, don’t we. It’s really a massive ball of churning hydrogen plas...
To help you out with your halloween parties, we’ve collected together the spooky sounds of space. Every piece of audio we’re about to play might sound like it comes from a terrifying nigh...
At least once a week we get an email claiming that Einstein was wrong. Well you know what, Einstein was right. In fact, as part of his theories of Special and General Relativity, Einstein made a seri...
What can we say about Einstein? Albert Einstein! Lots, actually. In this show we’re going to talk about the most revolutionary physicist… ever. He completely changed our understanding of time, ...
This is an impromptu episode of Astronomy Cast that we recorded during Dragon*Con 2011. Pamela was scheduled to speak with a panel about strange things in space, but she ended up being the only perso...
The Moon is a stark reminder that we actually live in a Universe filled with stars and planets and moons. The changing phases of the Moon show us the relative positions of the Earth, the Sun and the ...
Radar is one of the those technologies that changed everything: it allows boats and aircraft to “see” at night and through thick fog. But it also changed astronomy and ground imaging, tra...
In last season’s thrilling cliff hanger, we talked about astronomer superhero Galileo Galilei. Will a mission be named after him? The answer is yes! NASA’s Galileo spacecraft visited Jupi...
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