Astronaut Piers Sellers on Danny Baker

British astronaut, Piers Sellers was on the Danny Baker podcast this week. It was a fascinating interview. This is one of the guys who assembled the ISS in orbit while spacewalking. It was fascinating to hear him talk about his experiences and I found it amazing how down to earth (pun intended) he was. There was no arrogance and the conversation flowed freely and easily between them. I recommend you listen to it while it’s still available. I’m going to listen to it again.

National Space Centre – Leicester

We have a National Space Centre. It’s in Leicester. Given that I’ve always viewed any aspirations we may have about a space programme through the prism of an Eddie Izzard routine “We didn’t have enough money to put a man in a track suit up a ladder!” both these facts surprise me.

The other weekend I decided I wanted to go see a proper planetarium show. I decided against the one at the Think Tank in Birmingham because I didn’t really want to pay to go into the Think Tank again. A quick Google told me that the National Space Centre also had the Patrick Moore Planetarium so that was my decision. One of my friends came with me and we were there for about 6 hours. It was £13 to get in which was reasonable and by doing a gift Aid on it this gives return visits within a year. I’ll be going back again I think.

We took in a couple of planetarium shows. The first was the free one called “We Are Aliens” which was better than I expected being a CGI thing for the kids. For some reason it was a bit dark, kind of like the light loss you get with 3D but we weren’t wearing 3D glasses. It was impressive though being projected across the entire dome and there was some interesting stuff on exoplanets. There was a nice Solar System flythrough that I particularly liked.
We also went to a later proper planetarium night sky show which cost an extra £3. I could have done with a little less about the mythology relating to the constellations and more stuff to look at being pointed out. As it was I drifted off on my own a bit during the legends of Perseus and Andromeda and went did a bit of constellation spotting of my own, looking for other targets that I knew should be there that weren’t pointed out. They had pointed out Cassiopeia, Orion, Taurus, Andromeda, Perseus, Pegassus, the Plough. I also spotted M31 – the Andromeda Galaxy, the Hyades cluster, M45 – the Pleiades, the double cluster in Perseus, Jupiter and quite a few others.

There’s some good exhibition areas too. They’ve a Soyuz hanging over the main ticket area and a couple of rockets in the rocket tower. The Into Space area was one of the best, probably because it had stuff, a lot of which seemed to have been used by the most famous British Astronaut, Helen Sharman.

In the rocket tower they had a display that showed the “Space Race” on a timeline. One of the display objects that excited me was the set of Brooke Bond Tea Cards that I had as a kid. Driving home this evening I was listening to The Infinite Monkey Cage Podcast and Brian Cox was talking about how he’d been inspired by these as a boy too.

Other areas such as Exploring the Universe had to rely on models and information boards. These were pitched at a good level though, understandable to children and those with very little understanding of the subject, but at the same time giving adults and those with greater knowledge something to think about.
There was also a section called Tranquility Base where there were interactive things to play with and some sort of 3D simulator ride that we actually ran out of time to have a go on. Next time.
All in all, a great day out. Just one word of warning. Even though the car park is dedicated to the site, it’s still pay and display. I only realised as we were heading back to the car. I guess I might have been a bit too excitable when we arrived. Luckily I got away with it.

Podcast – Glipsing The Edge of the Universe: Results from the Hubble Space Telescope

I’m listening to a lot of astronomy podcasts at the moment. I find them to be a great way of unwinding on my evening commute home. My brain is usually still active from a days work and I need something that shifts my attention from the working day. I’ve found science podcasts, and in particular those with an astronomy bias to be really good for this. They’re educational and thought provoking.

There are a lot of good ones out there. I’ll feature some in upcoming posts.

My latest discovery is an archive of lectures from Foothill College’s Silicon Valley Astronomical Lectures. There are around 30 lectures available going back to 2005.

One particular lecture from 2007, given by Dr. Bruce Margon (University of California, Santa Cruz), that I found fascinating is entitled Glimpsing the Edge of the Universe: Results from the Hubble Space Telescope. It last about an hour and a half but is engaging throughout. Whilst it refers to slides that are shown during the lecture and I can’t find any show notes, many of the images referred to can be found in the Hubble gallery. I really wanted to see what he was talking about when he was talking about planetary formation in the Orion Nebula. Guess this is the images. It shows a disk of matter forming and silhouetted against the bright cloud of the nebula. At some stage the matter will likely collapse to cause a star to ignite.

Source: Hubblesite.org

If iTunes is your podcast software of choice the the link is http://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/silicon-valley-astronomy-lectures/id213308887
I prefer to use Downcast on my iPhone for my Podcasts so I use the feed at http://www.astrosociety.org/education/podcast/sval.xml