The Monkeys meet The Sky at Night

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Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

I'm Robert Inks and Brian is very, very excited about this week's The Infinite Monkey Cage.

His head is just reeling with excitement because

today is all about the sky at night with the sky at night.

Now, of course, the sky at night is one of the longest TV series in the world.

In fact, there's very few other TV shows that have been going for longer.

In fact, the two that we found out that have been going on for longer are actually the Miss America pageant and the Miss Universe pageant.

And interestingly enough, it was actually Patrick Moore's failure to get into the last three of the Miss Universe pageant which led to him doing the sky at night.

And I feel he was robbed because of all of the Miss Universe contestants, he undoubtedly explained the universe far better than any of the others.

Oh, we played the xylophone angrily that night.

Pretty daring in that bikini, isn't he?

The first three series of Sky at Night, all of him wearing a sash as well.

Miss Celsi.

Please stop.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to some new ingredients for your nightmares.

Now, astronomy is perhaps the most egalitarian of sciences because it's possible to take part without any equipment at all.

In fact, that's one of the many reasons it is far more popular than sequencing genomes or indeed searching for the Higgs boson.

And it is, in fact, amazing that it is estimated that there are at least 200 million astronomers in Hampshire alone.

With all estimates in astronomy, there might be 200 million astronomers or that might be out by a factor of about 200 million.

But that's astronomy, isn't it?

That's the level of error.

And we have the biggest errors in the universe.

So, you take any number, double it, multiply it by a million.

It's the same thing, really.

It's either one or lots.

One or many.

Today, we are joined by a presenter from The Sky at Night, a presenter from the Sky at Night, a presenter from The Sky at Night,

and the other presenter from Stargazing Live.

And they are.

I'm Chris Lintor, I'm an astronomer at Oxford and at Gresham College, and the most unusual thing I've seen in the sky is a comet hitting Jupiter.

Very strong start.

Very good.

I've got to up that.

My name is Pete Lawrence, and I'm an astronomer and an astrophotographer, and I present a little bit on the sky at night, which normally has me out in a field at night looking up at the stars.

So you could say I'm outstanding in my field.

Come on.

The most unusual thing I've ever seen in the sky, not the night sky, is the atmospheric ring of Venus.

So my name is Dr.

Maggie.

I'm a space scientist and science communicator.

Just out of interest, I also have a book out.

It's called The Art of Stargazing by BBC Books, available soon in all good bookshops.

But the most amazing thing that I have observed is the moon.

I am a lunatic and I observe the moon regularly, but I observe the moon through an eight-metre telescope.

Because now, with an eight-metre telescope, you usually encrypt things far, far, far away.

But because I'm an instrument builder, one day we were trying to calibrate the instrument, we needed a nice extended object.

So we looked at the moon with an eight-metre telescope, and it was amazing.

I'm Dora Breen, I'm a clown and

essentially, and a back garden astronomer and astrophotographer.

And the most amazing thing I ever observed had to be removed from my leg.

I don't know how it got there.

And I'm glad it's gone.

This is our panel.

Right, before we get to the kind of the main event, first of all, Chris, I wanted you were doing the sky at night, I believe, with Patrick Moore the first time that Brian Cox was on.

What was Patrick?

What was his kind of expectations of Professor Brian Cox?

There was some muttering.

So Patrick said he was sitting there going, Well, I I I think I've met this Cox fellow.

I think he's okay, but he is a particle physicist.

And so it was viewed with suspicion, I think, because as we know, particle physicists just collide things.

They don't pay attention to the very, very accurate.

Yeah, and you know, there was increasing levels of chantering, as Brian was late, I think, just a little bit late.

And we were all getting a bit worried that this was going to be some clash of ego,

Moore versus Cox.

You can imagine the showdown.

And Brian walked in and went, Patrick, it's lovely to see you again.

I've bought the Observer's Book of Astronomy, which you wrote, which taught me how to look at the sky.

And Brian was approved of from that moment.

I saw the coronation happen.

I had met him once before, actually.

I invited him to come to Manchester when I was an undergraduate.

And he came, I wrote to him and said,

and he came and gave a lecture.

And afterwards,

he didn't want to go straight back to his hotel.

He wanted to come for a drink, and we went for a few drinks.

And then we went back to my supervisor's house and had a few more drinks.

And then Patrick said that I have to get up to go and record the sky at night.

And it was about 4 or 5 a.m.

And he said, I have to be on the 6:30 a.m.

train.

So I'm just going to go to sleep for an hour.

And he had a suitcase with him that we'd noticed only contained xylophone hammers

when he arrived.

And we thought, why is he doing this?

And then we noticed when he was leaving, he couldn't close it.

And he was going, damn thing, I've got

trying to close it.

It was full of something.

And we thought, I don't know what it is.

And then anyway, about 11 o'clock, my supervisor, Professor Marshall, he had a phone call.

And it went, Professor Marshall, this is the BBC.

We think we have your trousers.

That was my first encounter with Patrick.

He stole my supervisor's trousers.

That's definitely the title of the autobiography with the Phil Pollins stuff in it and everything else.

Anyway, Maggie, what do you think it is that first caught your imagination in terms of becoming fascinated in astronomy?

Well, for me, it started really early on.

I think moon landings, clangers.

And actually, that is true.

People there go, you really, the clangers did play its part, didn't they?

Definitely.

Yeah.

When I was about four years old, my crazy idea was to go out and sort of walk next to the footsteps of Neil Armstrong.

Then I wanted to go out beyond and sort of go and visit the clangers.

And then I wanted to go and Star Trek sort of, yeah.

You start off with the clangers, and before you know it,

Star Trek is hardcore science fiction.

And so I started watching Star Trek.

So, yes.

I think it's also bigger than that.

Because when I was growing up, I thought that astronomy was done by white guys in togas.

It was the Romans, it was the Greeks, these are the guys who did astronomy.

But since then, I've learnt about archaeoastronomy.

And if you look back, and actually, there's a sort of United Nations website, Looking Back in Time, and every culture across the world has looked up at the night sky.

So I think it's something innate in all of us.

You know, sitting by the campfire, before we could even talk or grunt, it was

we wanted to understand what was out there.

And so I think it is, and I love to tell people that, that it is part for all of us.

And I said I'm a lunatic, but I sort of grew up in London and we were sort of just in a flat.

And I used to go up to the top of the flats and sort of look out at

old, musty London, but with the stars on top, even with the light pollution.

So I think something draws us to them.

Dara, you're also a London astronomer.

As you said, we were talking earlier, actually, about the problem, of course, with London is that you can see about eight stars on a clear night.

Yeah, because

I really got into it very seriously.

After being spoiled on stargazing for 10 years, where you'd go, well, I could struggle with equipment and

try to set up and do all the stuff.

Or we could just meet the people from Cassini who will send us cool images.

And they'll just, oh, no, no, I know.

I run that.

I run the imaging for this particular probe.

Here's the stuff we've seen.

And then it was during lockdown, and lockdown, if you remember, was incredibly clear, the weather for the first few days.

And I thought, going, I should get around to actually buying a proper scope at the stage and actually do this properly.

But yeah, the problem with doing it in London, as anyone in London knows, is the light pollution is so complete that you will only see the named stars.

You just see the famous constellations.

And it's almost as if that's it.

It's a tea towel at best of stars you already know the name to.

There's no depth to it, there's no texture to it at all.

It's just, well, there's the plow and there's Orion.

And it is just those,

which you'll see.

And

taking it up as a hobby in London is like if you took up scuba diving in London.

You decided that, like, no, I could go to the tropics or I could go to the Red Sea, but no, I'm just going to do the Thames.

And you would swim around in no viz,

seeing nothing, occasionally bumping into a shopping trolley.

And there's no joy in it at all.

It's grad.

You'll go out, you'll be cold, you'll hear the sound of foxes copulating.

space.

They are noisy, aren't they?

They really are.

And it sounds like someone's being murdered in the garden next door.

And it is quite scary.

So, yeah, so it's initially, it's quite discouraging as a thing, to be honest.

Once you get over the initial shock of it, but yet it captured your imagination, and you're now very heavily involved.

Yeah, I went to bit bananas and the whole thing, like, whatever.

And I would say the path, and I would, and I find myself constantly recommending people, the path is the moon, and the path is Jupiter and Saturn.

So

you get any scope, and you look through the moon, and you see the moon in detail, and suddenly you're into a whole different game.

And then if you see Jupiter and Saturn, and suddenly people go, and I remember, and I, it is on, it's on camera, me seeing

Saturn for the first time, because it was the very first thing we did in the very first Stargazing Live, is I ran across a field, and Mark Thompson had a setup involving a camera, and he said, Look into this.

And he had rehearsed me

during the day, and I would now lean forward and I would look into it.

That's great, but obviously, the thing wasn't there.

And so Sarah said, I don't dare if you could look into this.

It was Jupiter or Saturn.

And it looked genuinely amazing.

It looked like everything you hoped it would look like.

And that is what it delivers.

It delivers that.

What I love about that is the idea that light is coming from the sun, traveling huge distances in space, billions of kilometers, bouncing off a planet and then landing in your eye.

To me, that's magic.

And I just can't resist that.

But I think there's magic in even...

I'm a big fan of lazy astronomy, city astronomy, because I think being under a dark sky, as we'll get to, is amazing.

Looking through telescopes is amazing, but I think there's a wonder in the astronomy of stepping outside at night and looking up and seeing the familiar plow or seeing Orion and then noticing, I think...

Nothing makes you feel like you're actually on a planet than noticing that the stars are changing.

That, you know, Orion is in the evening sky at this time of year and six months ago it wasn't.

That the moon comes around and you see the phases changing.

You suddenly realize that we're on this globe globe that's turning that's got things orbiting it that orbits the Sun that moves in the galaxy and suddenly you can connect all of that even by seeing the familiar stars in a city so I think there is the wow of the cinematic 4d full scope dark sky universe and then there's the sort of

we're just here bit of the familiar stars and you talked about about lockdown like that that weird period of our lives I was really freaked out because we had these clear skies and Orion which is one of the most familiar constellations, two bright stars, Bettelgers, Betelgeuse, if you like, and Rigel and the belt in between, looked weird because Bettelgers had faded.

Betelgeuse had faded by about 25%, really noticeably.

And so, for the first time in my life, Orion looked different.

Out of balance.

Out of balance.

And that...

So that just, then it came back steadily and gradually.

But that connection to just being able to go and look, and I could do that from the middle of Oxford, you could do that from the middle of London.

I think there's something really

important about connecting to that as well as enjoying the basking in starlight from thousands of light years away.

Yeah, and it's really it's really it's wonderful to look from hour to hour to hour, as you said, because you really feel the rotation of the earth, don't you?

Yeah.

And then from month to month to month, especially if it's your garden, I find that when you when you know your garden and you see the sky change, that's uh we wanted to start talk, Peter, about that.

Ha the question would be how people who are listening who've never done any astronomy before would begin to do astronomy.

I mean, Chris has said, I suppose the first step is to just keep looking at the sky.

But where do you go from there if you feel that that's interesting and you want to pursue it?

That's a good question.

It's discovery for me, which is the really important thing.

It was looking for...

finding the stars and starting to recognize the stars

and then recognizing the bright dots which were in the wrong place and thinking they're a bit odd what are they?

And looking at them through a telescope and you do see Saturn and you see Jupiter and then you start to sort of do a bit of reading up on it and you think, wow, yeah, I can see the four brightest moons of Jupiter quite clearly through a small telescope.

But it's really simple things as well.

Like if the moon is up, people will often say, wow, look at that beautiful moon, and then move on.

But all you have to do is look at it and then really look at it.

Look at it and see the dark patches on it And try and see the smallest dark patch you can.

It's a really odd experience.

I don't know if you've ever tried to do that.

Just look at it and go in as close as possible.

Because as you do that, you start to get a connection with it.

And it actually makes me feel sick when I do it because I know what the features are.

And I'm trying to get smaller and smaller detail.

And it really does make you feel a bit odd as you do it.

It's all about the experience of looking as well.

With the moon, in particular, there's this thing called the moon illusion.

which is people always have,

lots of you in the audience will have had the experience of seeing a full moon rise and it feels enormous and dominates the scene.

And then you get your camera out, you get your phone out, and you take a picture of it, and the picture looks really disappointing.

And what's happening is your brain does something weird when the moon is low down.

It tells you that the moon is large.

It's something to do with how it relates to the horizon.

And as the moon rises in the sky, the illusion corrects itself.

And so it shrinks.

And in a photo, photo, the illusion doesn't exist.

And so, your brain, for some reason, doesn't correct the image.

So, what you're seeing in the photo is reality, but you see the moon, and your hind brain is going, Look, there's a big, scary thing rising.

I must make that important and larger.

So, it's a nice reminder.

That happens with constellations as well.

When they're low down on the horizon, they look bigger than they do when they're higher up.

And didn't I read somewhere that if you stand on your head, it goes away?

Yeah, that's right, yeah, yeah.

If you stand on your head, I promise this is true, but next you see the full moon rising and it looks enormous, if you genuinely stand on your head or look through your legs, I promise your brain will correct the illusion because it screws with the horizon.

I want to ask you how it so you mentioned, Pete, actually, a small telescope, but I remember Patrick always said, I remember it vividly saying, start with your eyes, as you said, and then binoculars are a better choice

than a very cheap telescope.

The problem with binoculars is they're not that exciting for people.

People want that vision of a telescope, like, you know, standing on a ship looking out to sea, but they want to do that with the stars, and they don't get excited about binoculars.

I think we're dusting with someone.

Yeah, we're just crazy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We've reached a great divide here.

It's you versus everyone else, exactly.

Sorry, Pete.

Because I think, and I'm sure that if you look to binoculars, you will see the effect of things coming out of the darkness.

You'll see more detail than you would expect to see.

You're suddenly seeing a lot of extra light and a lot of extra stars.

Oh, yes, you do.

That I think is.

But it isn't the same as having a telescope and having the telescope pointing at something and being able to relax when you're looking through the dust.

That's also quite kind of like fetishizing the whole thing.

It doesn't sound to me like astronomy.

I mean, in some ways, it sounds very Freudian as well, obviously.

One of the nice things about binoculars is when you've got a telescope, it takes quite a bit of setting up.

With binoculars, you grab them, you go outside, you have a look.

Bit nippy now, I'm right nipping.

Oh, let's go again later.

They're just very ready and able.

And so, yes, usually for me, it's sort of meteor shower

on a trampoline with my daughter, glass of wine for me, not for my daughter.

You watch meteorite showers while bouncing on a trampoline.

Less bouncing, more support.

Oh, okay.

But also, just with this,

it's like the leaping nuns in Pete and Dud, isn't it?

Things they reveal to you as well.

So, Andromeda, for example, the Andromeda Galaxy, very difficult to see with the naked eye, so you can't see it from London.

But a pair of 10 by 50 binoculars, you will see this thing.

It's what you said, Maggie, actually.

I always think that when I look at that, and I think the light began its journey before we'd evolved on Earth.

Two million light years away, that thing.

So there is another layer, as you said, Dara, isn't there, when you get a pair of binoculars, which is the easiest and cheapest way in, I suppose.

Yeah, absolutely.

And because you will see detail being uncovered.

And it is an impressive thing.

Yes, obviously, then you can carry on off the journey.

But I think it is the thing that is startling.

And that's a good thing, because you look up and go, well,

I can see a constellation there, I can see the plow.

And if I look to binoculars, suddenly I'm seeing a lot more than that, because it is grabbing photons.

And so they're going, oh, hello, it's like a curtain being pulled back.

Yes.

And then you know more curtains can be pulled back.

And with binoculars as well, for two eyes is easier than one for most.

You learn the skill of looking, as you well know, Pete, you learn the skill of looking through a telescope and doing that.

But if you just go, I love the idea, just going outside, pick up binoculars, and just scanning.

And I don't really care if I do that, what I'm looking at.

I'll go down the Milky Way in the summer or the winter and look for clusters.

And it's not sort of targeting.

I'm not an astrophotographer, but it's just a way of quickly connecting to the

I get that, but that, I think, is part of the issue.

If you're trying to get into it in a deeper way, that you want to be able to focus on the things which you're really looking for.

There's three one piece.

And three one.

Everyone has worked out you have got a telescope stall at Greenwich Market.

The lunch who sells the binoculars is currently beating you.

We understand that

I just want to

think you said, Chris, you said you just with binoculars you scan down the Milky Way in the summer and you start to see clusters.

So so could you describe what you're seeing there?

Sure.

Well one place to look is there's the constellation of Cassiopeia which is this W or M shape in the sky.

So it's near the plough.

It's reasonably easy to look at.

And it's at the heart of a dense stellar patch in our galaxy.

So if you look with the naked eye from a dark site, you see the Milky Way going through there.

But if you look through binoculars, you pick out these concentrations, these cities of stars scattered around that part of the Milky Way.

And they're mostly young stars.

They form together.

and they haven't yet dispersed.

So some of these objects are a bit like our sun's family would have been maybe

four billion years ago or something like that.

So we're picking out

the early stages of new stellar creation in the Milky Way.

Wonderful.

You always say, Robin, about that.

It was Richard Feynman, wasn't it?

Who said, the more you know about something, the more wonderful and beautiful it gets.

Astronomy is surely that, isn't it?

The way you describe that, the idea you could get a pair of binoculars and go out and see clusters, cities of young stars.

It's beautiful.

It does.

And it's evocative.

And yeah, I remember faming here because he was talking about a flower.

And his friend said, oh, you scientists, you see a a flower, you don't see its beauty, you just see the science.

But you can see, yeah, the beauty and the science.

And to me, that is just, yeah, it makes me gives me goosebumps.

Well, that's the different layers.

I was interested because, you know, because, Dar, so you only really got into astronomy as an adult then.

It wasn't a kind of childhood thing from what you were saying.

As a child, I enjoyed the permanence of it, and I enjoyed the recurring nature of

when I discovered, for example, the plow.

Because I would be sent out to shut a gate or put a bin out or something like that, like whatever, some sort of job.

and then I would look up and I would see as I was singing my lament at the difficult life of being a child

who will buy who will buy my beautiful feeling

and I would but then I would recognize specific specifically the plow and then I remember going in holling and seeing the plow again and just being warmed by the fact that this is a thing which is permanent in the sky and that you'll see from all over the world and that is a that is a glorious thing that that was my thing as a child but it was later that I got into it and then decided to go on the technical journey of, well, let's see what we can see.

Because it is a thing that unfolds in phases and stages.

And it'll hook you in with seeing the shadows on the crater of a moon, or it'll hook you in of seeing the rings, which is relatively, these things are relatively easy to see because telescopes now you press a button and it will auto-find stuff for you, which is great.

And I know that people probably get there, people are purist about this, like whatever, but the easier they make this, the better.

And then you get into the simple act of sticking a camera on the end of it.

and then you can then you go beyond the greatest boundary we have is the which is our ability to take in an image which is faint and renewing and means there's a stuff we can't see because we can't gather enough of enough photons in our eyes you put a camera onto it you can open that shutter for 30 seconds or for eight minutes or you can do it for 10 minutes and then do it 20 times in a row and you spend whatever four hours of just an open shutter on the same target, stuff arriving in.

You will see nothing in each of the individual pictures, and then you'll put them together on top of each other, and then magically, like a nebula appears, or a galaxy appears, or something you could never see with your eye appears, because we've created a situation where we can slowly capture photons from incredibly distant things.

Well, that's what I was thinking.

I wanted to ask, you know, Chris, that psychological effect, like we did a gig in a back garden in Northampton, didn't we?

And the ISS went over and all that kind of thing.

That's the difference between you and me, Baron.

You do the O2 in London, and Chris and me do back gardens in northampton

but it was but that experience because i think again the more knowledge that that moment where you can just enjoy the stars the to revel in that light but then to when you find out that it's hydrogen becoming helium and it's becoming and that's creating the photons and then as as both of you over there mentioned as well that that fact that you're looking back in time and I think that does even when you're not consciously thinking about that there's there is something that really seems to stir you to think

we're looking in another direction of time as well.

Yeah, back in time and back in history as well.

So, Brian talked about seeing the Andromeda galaxy, which you can just see from a dark sky with naked eyes.

It's just a fuzzy patch.

And actually, because the galaxy is annoyingly edge-on, it's the nearest big galaxy to our own, but it's only tilted slightly towards us.

So, we never get a really good view of it, even with a big telescope.

But it's the fact that that light had traveled f for millions of years and hit the eyeball that's impressive.

But also, sort sort of the connection between our solar system and what we see happening.

One of my favorite, or in fact, my favorite object is the Orion Nebula, which, if you look with the naked eye, it's just obviously not a star, but you're not sure what it is.

It's this fuzzy patch.

Binoculars don't help you very much.

And through a telescope, you see the bright young stars that are now only a few million years old lighting up the gas from which they formed.

And there's this William Herschel, who is the great English observer who, along with his sister, discovered Uranus and did all sorts of other things,

wrote about it as

imagining seeing the unformed fiery mist of a thousand unborn stars.

And that's much more poetic than anything in a paper we write these days.

But it's also the feeling you get from seeing this thing.

Sorry, I was just going to say, specifically in the Orion Nebula, which is obviously one of the greatest things in nature.

But every time I look at it, I can see a motorbike helmet on a poncho.

And that's all I can see.

And now that's the thing.

And the ruin of the Orion Nebula.

Once that's in your head, oh, the person in the poncho is riding the motorbike again.

I want to look at it and see that now.

And every time I hear somebody talk poetically about it, I go, no, room for room in the rain.

Dara, thank you for sharing that with so many other people whose dreams of the night sky have also been ruined.

Oh, sorry, yeah, I know how to skip.

I love that.

You see, once you imagine something, you see these things.

Herschel and co- in the note TC actually used to sketch this stuff, but there was this big argument between people who thought that galaxies, what we'd call galaxies, were just nebulae, and people who thought that they were

distant galaxies.

And two people looking through the same telescope, drawing what they see, draw completely different objects based on what they think they are.

So, you know, the motorbike poncho hypothesis is new, but I will see it differently,

genuinely.

That's why you've actually called it the motorbike poncho hypothesis.

Yeah, yeah, well, we could get at least a couple of postdocs

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I just quickly go back to the lazy astronomy, which is

for those people who are listening to this who now might go out afterwards and look up in the night sky.

And there's a bit of pressure on you here, by the way, because this show is going out at the beginning of November, but it's also the Christmas show, and some people will be listening to a repeat in January.

So, for all three of of you, if you could tell, first of all, for those who are listening in November, Pete, what if they walked out now and it's a clear night in the northern hemisphere, what are they hoping to see?

The bright dot you can see, the bright star you can see, is the planet Jupiter, which is coming to opposition when it's at the opposite part of the sky to the Sun, right at the beginning of November.

And that looks really impressive just to the naked eye.

And when the moon gets close to it, that's a lovely thing to look out for.

But as you go into the middle of November, on the night of the 17th, 18th, you've got the Leonid meteor shower.

And it's not the richest meteor showers, to be honest,

but every 33 years it has storm activity when you see thousands of meteors per hour.

For this year, it'll probably be about 15 or so.

But it is, meteor showers are great because you can just go outside, find the darkest spot you've got, and just look up.

Get yourself comfortable on a sun lounger or something and just look up.

You don't even need a trampoline.

But the glass of wine is.

And the glass of wine is does help.

When's the next Leonid storm?

Is it 2030?

About 2030.

Was it at the turn of the century?

Because I slept through the last one because it was cloudy and then I went to sleep and it cleared up.

And friends of mine saw it.

It's my worst confession as an astronomer.

So I'm not sleeping that year.

In November, I will be out with a glass of wine under the sky, even if it's cloudy.

Because that I want to see.

What year was that?

I'm trying to remember.

So that would, there were a few.

1999, I think.

99, 2000, 2001, there were peak activity.

It wasn't ideally placed for the UK, but there was one evening where we got hundreds of meteors a second, which is what you're led to expect from Hollywood, right?

If you see a meteor shower in

fireworks,

but I have experienced that with some of the other mainstream meteor showers.

The Persids, which peaks in August, one year, there were so many that we couldn't record them.

We're just standing there under fireball after fireball falling out of the sky.

And these are all bits of comet.

That's the

tiny bits of comet,

typically the size of a grain of sand, but maybe a bit bigger for a fireball, like a grape or something, just vaporising in the atmosphere.

But there's a

maude feel to it as you're watching these things coming.

And sometimes they have different colours depending on what they're made of.

Yes, that's right.

Like flame tests shooting across the sky.

I always get them out of the corner of my eyes.

Damn it, miss.

Maybe Maggie could just pick up on that.

The bits of comet.

Yes.

People will have heard that and thought, what do you mean bits of comet?

And also, why is it 33 years, there's a big storm?

So, why are they so regular, and how come we know they're bits of comet?

Yes, and so a comet like Halley,

as it sort of goes in towards the sun and then sort of moves back out, it will leave a trail of debris, the comet's tail, which always points away from the sun.

And as the earth orbits the sun, it will pass through that debris

And as those tiny bits, as Pete says, those grain-sized pieces burn up on the atmosphere, they will form these meteor showers.

And as I say, depending on what they're made of, they could be different colours.

And yes, depending on how the Earth is passing through them, well depend on how the intensity of that meteor shower.

So sometimes you're sort of you're right in the heart of it, so you get sort of many, many sort of shooting stars, nothing to do with stars, a horrible

misnomer.

But And sometimes you sort of pass at the edge of it, and so you don't quit quite so many.

So, yes, it very much depends on that trail.

But that's the really important bit about observing meteor showers and recording it, because only by doing that can people make forecasts about what's going to happen in the years ahead.

So, when you have,

for example, with a comet where it's vented material off and created a denser leg of material going around in that orbit, when the Earth goes through it, that's when we get enhanced meteor activity.

This does raise the question about the value of amateur astronomers, because it is probably one of the only sciences I can think of, certainly the physical sciences, where amateurs play a key role

in observation.

Well, we should say, because this is, you know, a sky at night special as well, that Patrick Moore wasn't a scientist, was he?

Patrick Moore was someone who became...

He didn't have a science degree, for sure.

Yeah, he described himself as a broadcaster and a writer, but self-taught astronomer as well.

But that's the thing, you know, for any of us growing up, the number of books and the number of people that, you know, and,

you know, commentary on Apollo 11, all of those things, I mean, that I think should give everyone, you know, anyone here who hasn't got a science degree, a tremendous amount of heart to say that just because he didn't go through that didn't mean that he didn't become someone who's incredibly important in terms of communicating ideas about

the galaxy, the universe, etc.

Yeah, but I think that's so important that amateurs play such a vital role because I worked on big telescopes, I saw build space telescopes, actually

JWST.

But yes, amateurs sometimes will flag something up.

Because there are so many astronomers out there, they will flag something up.

Like when something hit Jupiter,

and that was someone observing, an amateur observing, something's weird's happened to Jupiter.

Sort of phone up and it gets through to the big telescope.

So they slew their telescopes, and so we get the detail.

So it's a wonderful sort of synergy.

And the sort of thing you do, Chris, with citizen science.

Oh, well, that's stuff online, yeah.

So that's for cloudy nights where we put data online at Zooniverse and ask people to classify galaxies, look at Mars, keep an eye on asteroids for us.

So that works too, but it's the amateur observers that are the good.

It says, oh, meteor showers are very important.

But the people who do the weather for the giant planets, the people who tell us what's happening on Jupiter and Saturn, are the distributed network of amateur astronomers.

The professionals can't afford to spend all of our time using all of our big telescopes looking at Jupiter.

In fact, even the Juno spacecraft, which flies over the clouds of Jupiter, swoops in about once every 90 days and does a really close pass and takes these amazing pictures.

The context for those comes from people with webcams and telescopes that are every night out mapping what's happening on the storms of Jupiter.

And as Maggie said, just in the last few months, there have been a couple of sightings of flashes of light on Jupiter, which we think are things hitting the atmosphere.

So we're watching Jupiter clean up the solar system.

And those rare events are discovered by amateurs.

Can I just put one note in?

As someone who loves this and has been doing this on or for years, man, we over-promise in this subject so much.

We really do.

Because we produce the most beautiful images and we bring them out and they're some things in space or things that we put 40 hours of imaging into.

And I think people have occasionally go, oh, that's what I'll see.

Whereas, in fact, if you're from your garden, a lot of the time, it's a bit like, you know, when you go to the lizard house in the zoo and you spend ages looking going, is there anything there?

I'm not sure if I'm seeing it.

Is that just a leaf or am I seeing

like a stick insect?

I'm not really sure if I'm seeing it.

A lot of what you'll see when you do this are fuzzy dots.

There's a lot of,

man, there's times you pass a fuzzy dot, you're really excited about a fuzzy dot.

There's a fuzzy dot.

I can't wait to look at fuzzy dots.

There's the entire classification system, the Messier, 107, whatever the Messier, 107 fuzzy dots.

And the Messier said, these are all, what are you reaching?

He's looking for comets.

Those are comets.

are a bit like but aren't comets but comets yeah and they turn out to be wow they are not comets they are like galaxies and they're clutch, they're clusters of 30,000 stars, not a comet.

And because

on the telescopes from there, they look fuzzy, they're fuzzy dots a lot of the time, like whatever.

There's only a certain number of plants in the solar system.

It is a joyous and wonderful thing.

But if you buy a telescope, it's not like, what do we look at next?

And you'll see a spaceship passing in front of a nebula.

It doesn't do that.

Yes, but I think that's one of the challenges with sort of space science.

Because yeah, the Hubble Space Telescope takes glorious images.

The James Webb Space Telescope takes glorious images.

People look at those and think, oh,

because they're not as

AWS T takes a lot of pictures of fuzzy blobs as well.

Let's be clear.

I've got colleagues who call themselves blobologists.

But you're right, Darren.

The deep sky stuff is fuzzy and faint.

And it's about the idea of what you're seeing.

All the astrophotography, the things that people in their back gardens in places as far afield as Ipswich take pictures of the distant universe.

And the images are amazing.

so it's about stacking those images and creating.

But a lot of it is about getting your eye in as well.

I mean, if you have somebody that has had years of experience looking at the planets, they will see things instantly that somebody that just looks through the eyepiece the very first time will not see because their eyes have become tuned to it.

And unfortunately, to see those things, you do have to put the hours in.

You do need to go outside and look at the planet and think, Crikey, it's exactly the same as it was last time.

But

Very slowly, things start to appear to you, and that's where the connection occurs, and that's where the wow event occurs, because that's where you start to.

Can we just talk about telescopes?

Because we've talked about the naked eye, we talked about binoculars.

When we talk about amateur telescopes,

if someone's interested, what kind of telescopes are out there?

What will be a starter telescope?

How much are we talking about?

What are the things to really

matter?

It used to be really easy.

I remember there was a telescope, it was in the Exchange and Mart.

Remember that?

And I used to try and save my pocket money for it, and I could never quite get enough.

I would buy some other gizmo or something.

So that was really disappointing.

So in the end, I made my own.

But nowadays, there are just hundreds of different types of telescope out there.

So you need to sort of make a bit of a choice as to where you're going to go.

But a small lens-based telescope is probably a good place to start because you can move that around, it's easy to point, it's easy to point at things.

It's like having a half a binocular, but you can put it on a platform so it's easy to use.

But there's also this, I think there's two divisions.

There's lenses and mirrors, and so small lenses have become very good, whereas if you want to see the faint, fuzzy stuff that Dara dislikes, then big mirrors are helpful.

Don't get wrong, don't I love that stuff, but don't don't think that when you buy your telescope, you're going to see

that.

Yeah, that makes sense.

So, so mirrors are important.

And then the other divide that I think is really important is early on, decide whether you're somebody who's going to take pictures or not.

Because if you want to do astrophotography, then you need a drive that will follow the sky as it turns, and you probably need something that will find objects for you.

If you're just going to plonk the telescope out after a glass of wine and have a look round the sky, then you can have a maybe something like a Dobzonian, which is essentially a big bucket with a mirror at the bottom that you plonk and then you can wave around.

The biggest problem is people buying large telescopes because a large telescope is good, but it's also difficult to take outside.

And there's a saying in astronomy that the best telescope is the one that gets used.

So if you get a really big one and you can't carry it outside, then it's a pointless exercise.

The two pieces of advice, whenever I

always say, I started with a short fat tube, which is good for solar systems and the moon and stuff like that, like whatever, because

it's a smaller image rather than pulling it.

Anyway, but but the shortfat tube is good

as a starter

because I know that as a starter.

But the other advice I always give is: it is one of those industries where there are enthusiasts running shops and they know exactly what the price point and stuff and what stuff is available but not.

And there's a number of really great shops, whether it's First Light Optics or Rother Optics or Harvard.

There's loads of these shops run by people who are really into this.

And it's like it's not been, it's almost unique in not having, there's no chain selling telescopes, really.

You end up in the warm embrace of people who are really into this and they're really good.

That's absolutely what I'd recommend.

Going to star parties really makes a lot of difference because you can try different telescopes, and there, too, there are people who live for this stuff.

I've got a newbie, come see.

And in a good way.

Yes, we can.

Yes, they will invite you and show you different telescopes.

And so you get a feel of them before you try before you buy.

That's what I had the first time that I saw Saturn through a telescope.

I was doing a book festival, and this woman came up to me and she went, My boyfriend set up his telescope.

Do you want to come and see Saturn?

And it was done in this real beautiful, like, hey,

we don't need to get around amongst two people.

And went to this corner of this garden, and looking at that with this whole kind of and knowing the joy of someone going, Should we ask that bloke we just saw if he wants to come and see Saturn?

And it had a, you know, that sense of excitement.

And then, as you said as well, Dora, there is, however small it might appear to be, however, you know, hazy it might, seeing the shape of Saturn through a telescope, I think there really is, there's a reaction, it doesn't matter how many times you've seen images on posters, images in books, to see it in its reality.

Yes,

you know,

the thing, the story I tell that really encapsulates that is being in a car park in Germany with a telescope pointing at Saturn and a long queue of people who are queuing up to look through it.

And what makes the story remarkable, other than the fact I was hanging out in a car park in Germany looking at Saturn, is that the car park belonged to the ESA mission control in Darmstadt.

And it was the evening that the Huygens probe had been dropped off by Cassini and had landed on Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

And the queue of people were all the people who'd built and flown this mission to Saturn to land on Titan.

And most of them had never looked through a telescope before.

And I just stood near the front of the line and watched these people go, is that...

Is that where we landed?

Because you can see Titan.

And that was incredible.

Watching those worlds collide was just fabulous.

I wanted to ask you all about the...

I mean, Saturn is a moving experience, isn't it?

As you said, Robin, to see it for the first time, because

it looks like a kid's drawing of a planet, doesn't it?

It's remarkable.

So I wanted to ask you all about your astronomy memories.

So it could be professional memories through telescopes.

What really stands out as something that you saw and experienced and thought that's just magnificent.

Well, mine was the one I mentioned at the start of the show, actually, which was while I was still at school, there was this comic called Schumacher-Levy 9, which was seen.

It was like a string of pearls, they described it as, near Jupiter.

So, not just one comet, but lots of cometlets, little comet bits.

And it had been split up by Jupiter's gravity, and these bits over the course of a week slammed into Jupiter's atmosphere.

And the impact happened around the back of the planet, so we couldn't see it, and no one was really sure what would happen.

But I took out my tiny homemade, homemade, I didn't make it, but small telescope at home, in the back garden, looked at Jupiter a few hours after the first impact, and there was this dark bruise in the atmosphere of the planet.

And I grabbed my parents, and I was lucky I went to a school that had a telescope, and I forced my rather confused parents to drive me across town so I could use the bigger telescope to see this thing.

And I realized I was seeing something that nobody in history had knowingly seen before, apart from every other astronomer on the planet,

that evening.

And over the course of the week, we just watched as these things appeared.

And over the course of the next few months, they disappeared back into Jupiter's atmosphere.

But it was just this sense of the universe changing in front of my eyes and this magical thing appearing through a telescope.

Some of those impacts were Earth-sized impacts.

That's right, yeah, the bruises that were left.

Yeah, and then actually, people went back and they found at least one instance in the historical record where people had seen a dark bruise appear in Jupiter's atmosphere but not known what had caused it.

Pete, Pete, how about you?

Well, I ought to explain what I said at the beginning about the atmospheric ring of Venus.

Basically Venus is an inferior planet which means it's rubbish.

It doesn't mean that at all.

It's got an orbit which is smaller than the Earth, so that's what an inferior planet is.

So in the sky you see it do an ellipse around the Sun.

Now when it's on the earthward side of that ellipse, as it's getting closer towards the Sun, if you look at it through a telescope, it's got a beautiful crescent.

But as it gets really close to the Sun,

the cusps of the crescent begin to extend, so they go over 180 degrees.

And when I was a boy, I can remember seeing in an astronomy book in my school library, there was a picture of a complete ring where the cusp extensions had gone all the way around.

And that was one of my wow moments.

That was when I was really hooked.

So I thought I would go for this.

And during the lockdown period, there was a beautifully clear daytime sky right up to the point where Venus was going to be really close to the Sun.

I hadn't really factored in how dangerous this was going to be.

With a big telescope, it's catching sunlight and you're having to mask it off to stop yourself from being incinerated basically.

But I did manage to catch it.

So the extensions went all the way around, you had a complete 360 degree ring.

But the really amazing thing about this, looking at it, was the fact that because it was really, really close to the sun, you were getting forward-scattered light from pollen coming through the field of view.

So it was like trying to observe the planet in a snowstorm of pollen.

That's pollen on Earth.

Pollen on Earth.

We're not doing the intergalactic bees this time.

That was too much of a revelation for the audience.

But that was just stunning to see, and that remains my favourite, I think.

Yeah, I think for me, it's going to be the moon again.

But But I remember sort of

just following the moon.

Like you darling, you sort of go out, put the rubbish, and you put the rubbish out, oh, look, there's the moon.

And I do it today.

Sometimes my daughter and I do howl at the moon, but that's another story.

I remember sort of going out.

This was when I was at like 13, 14, going out and looking up at the moon and thinking, that's not right.

That the phase of the moon isn't right.

And it freaked me out.

I don't understand.

It was close to four yesterday, and now part of the moon is missing.

I don't get it.

And it turned out later that I was actually witnessing a lunar eclipse.

And I didn't realize that that was what was happening at the time, but then I realized later, and I thought, wow, I am part of this amazing universe, and I can observe things, and I'm aware of the moon.

And when sort of a lunar eclipse happens, I can actually see it and sort of be part of that.

So that was quite magical for me.

I'm going to tell you a very, very quick story about the very first time I took a picture of space, and it required no telescopes at all.

It is just you put a camera on a tripod and you aim it.

You stick something in the foreground, and then you spend ages trying to work out how to focus it because you've never done it.

and you take loads of different shots for four seconds, for eight seconds, whatever, until maybe one of them turns out to be amazing and beautiful.

And I did this in Australia on a trip to do Stargate.

I remember you bought the camera at the airport.

You bought the camera in the airport, absolutely.

You brought me, you held my hand as we went into Curry's in the airport and I bought a camera there.

And I brought over and the guy got me, so me a tripod as well.

And it's all very nice.

And I was in this amazing place called Siding Springs.

which is you know is built for nighttime versus daytime and we're in the canteen area of it and there's a guy I'm just chatting to there he seems to be he was from Britain and I'm chatting away and he said what are you doing so I'm gonna go out and take a few shots and then he went oh well a good look he said and I said oh thanks very much and I walked off and I met you and I said yeah no no I'm just gonna go just talking to that guy over there and you said that's that's David Mallon he's the inventor of colour astrophotography

This is the guy who invented the technique of RGBL, which unfortunately get all of the images and the father of it all, right?

And I said, I shall go and talk to him again.

And I sat down and chatted chatted to this guy, born in Bury, as far as I remember, and spent most of his career over in Australia, still has a British accent.

And I said, Look, have you any tips?

And he said, I'll give you two tips, he said.

So, this might get really technical, okay?

So, bear with me.

Tip number one, he said, when you're going out with a tripod, take a rucksack with you, fill up with cans of beer, hang the rucksack from underneath the tripod, it will steady the tripod and make a better photograph.

Then drink the beer.

Drink the beer, yeah.

Both you and the tripod have become more unstable until eventually you've drunk all the beer, it's time to go in.

Technical advice number one.

And the other one he did, which is another thing that you can do, which is a very pleasant thing to do, is called a star trail where you basically set up a camera an incredibly long exposure so it'll catch the stars spinning around in the sky above it.

Again, no telescope needed and you can do that on any on any DSLR camera.

This will be very easy to do.

And he said, I did that poster, he said, and there's a famous poster of Science Pinks, which is an 11-hour star trail.

So it's almost the entire way around for this, these all these arcs of light.

It's an incredible image.

I said, Oh my god, that must have been incredibly difficult.

He said, There were unique difficulties with it, he said, because what you do, you set the camera up at dusk, you open the exposure of it, you bring down the gain, all that kind of stuff.

He said, But the greatest technical problem is when you go to bed at some point in the night, kangaroos will walk up to the camera,

will not recognize what it is, and will punch it over.

So, the greatest difficulty has he had to build a kind of like barriers around the camera to stop the kangaroos ruining the shot.

And that was the number one piece of advice he has.

And if you take nothing else from this, beware kangaroos.

They are a natural enemy of the astrophotographer.

So, you've given us two good things there.

You've said London, it's not great for stars, but on the plus side, the kangaroo issue is not nearly as important when you're doing it.

It's very much swings around about seeing when you gain and one, you lose in the other, really, to be honest.

I think that one of the things is in the southern hemisphere, you're looking into the heart of the Milky Way.

And so

it's disappointing, but in the southern hemisphere, wow, are the stars so beautiful.

And it's funny with the Aboriginals, they didn't come up with constellations.

Because if you have a good clear night, you see so many stars.

You're not going to do a dot to dot with that.

And they just looked at sort of clouds of dust.

Like, they call that the emu and call that something else.

Because there's just so many stars.

So in the southern southern hemisphere, they are really lucky.

It is beautiful.

It's worth bearing in mind as well.

You were talking about astrophotography with a camera, which you'd bought.

A lot of smartphones now are capable of taking great photographs of the night sky.

And some of them are pretty incredible.

Mine will do a long exposure, and it does lots of little ones and then just adjusts them so they're not wobbly.

And it brings out some amazing pictures.

Or the simplest thing in the world is you set up a camera or a phone or whatever and you do an interval shot and then you end up with a video of the Earth stationary and the stars going.

That is surprisingly easy to do and just works.

It's lovely.

And what if you if you if you are doing that and you're traveling, if you do that in different places, you get a sense of the where you are on the planet you are because the arcs are different if you're further north from on the equator and so on.

And as well as the different stars, the movement of the stars is different.

So it's back to this sense of being on a moving planet situated in this universe.

I really felt you mentioned it earlier, Maggie.

For me, that's the remarkable thing about astronomy: that you, at some point, you get the sensation, a visceral sensation, that you are on a rock in a universe.

And for me, actually, what one

scene of total solar eclipse is a remarkable thing.

I really got that sensation vividly.

But also, just looking at Jupiter through a small telescope, because you see what Galileo, what the light bulb that went on when he saw those moons, because they're so obviously going around it

that you suddenly feel that you are things go around things, which you don't get that sensation, but I don't think you get that unless you.

That's right, and of course, he had that profound revelation, and then he tried to name them after his funders.

Because science always goes back to how you make money out of these things as well.

Oh, hey, sure, Cole.

Uranus was George himself.

It was, yeah, you wanted to call Uranus George.

And yeah, there's a long history of astronomers not being allowed to name things after people who've given them money.

The kings.

But yeah, yeah, yeah.

So there's two parts to this.

I remember seeing,

I was looking at the Orion Nebula with my small telescope when I was a kid, and I nudged it, and this beautiful star cluster came into view.

And I didn't know there was a large star cluster next to the, I knew about the one in the poncho, obviously, but not the one next to the Orion Nebula.

And so I went inside, I pulled out my Atlas of the Stars, and there was nothing there.

And I remember putting a cross and writing Lintot1.

Waiting until next day to get online and discover it's NGC 1981.

It was discovered in the 17th century.

I made an independent discovery of it.

One quick thing before we finish, we've run out of time, but because cloud cover is a major issue, as we know, in fact, even recording a radio show today, stargazing light in Manchester every day.

You've got the greatest collection of people who've said the words, well, unfortunately, it's cloudy tonight

on camera.

But you told me one story about a way, again, of observing when there is cloud cover.

Yeah, well, this comes back to meteor showers and trying to count meteors.

And so, this is something that amateurs do with radio equipment.

And you need so little equipment that I've actually done this from on top of one of the plinths in Trafalgar Square, basically, to show off.

And what you do is you have an antenna, a normal television antenna, and you tune it.

Ideally, if you're in the UK, you tune it to Canadian television.

Now, you don't actually pick up Canadian television most of the time from the UK, but when there is a shooting star in the atmosphere, very briefly, briefly you get an ionized trail, and a signal will bounce off that trail, and you get a little murmur of a detection of Canadian television.

And so you count these beeps, and you can do meteor observing even from the middle of the city, even when it's cloudy.

That's fantastic.

How did that image of you stood on a plinth in Copagus Bear with a television aerial?

Yeah, and the loudspeaker, so I could broadcast it to the beach as well.

Yeah, your ego after Lin Top One was going on.

Statue, I am my own living statue.

I am broadcasting the universe to you.

Now we also asked our audience a question today and that question was what is the object you would most like to observe in the night sky and why?

Brian, what do you got?

Intelligent life.

They keep promising.

A cow jumping over the moon because I was taught that they can but have never seen one in 75 years.

Tim, we hope that dream will come true for you.

I've got a little blue box in brackets, the TADIS.

What have you got, Dar?

Somebody says Earth from a parallel universe so I can find my cat.

Is it logical?

I don't understand that.

Yeah, it's interesting because I would have presumed parallel universe.

The cat may or may not have, you know, that feels like a multiverse thing rather than a.

Yeah.

Is it a multiverse, right?

This is the great thing.

You write what you think is a joke, and Brian then marks it from a scientific perspective.

No, I mean, the fact that he actually has just said, that is not logical.

If it revealed that he's more replicant than he was.

Well, I think it depends on how the cat went missing, I think.

If that had happened because of a particular quantum event, then perhaps there's some logic.

We don't know.

That may be the branching point that created the power.

He's not taught this through.

The moon made of cheese because things can only get fetter.

A giant bat because wings can only get better.

The brightest star because blings can only get better.

Aliens, oh no, we're back to the normal.

And this one just says my wife.

That's Mike, who is in the audience with his wife, Sarah.

Hello for both of you.

So, thank you very much to our guests, Chris Lintock, Maggie Darren Pocock, Pete Lawrence, and Dara O'Brien.

Yeah, and you can see us on that old-fashioned thing that they invented before podcasts.

Yeah, Brian isn't very good on old.

He means the box they used to keep CFAX in,

which is this will also be appearing on television as well.

So you can see us on television, on the sky at night, on Monday, November the 13th or on BBC iPlayer.

And we're off for a couple of months, so we thought it will be good to set you some homework.

Now, Chris, because you are involved in the Zooniverse, you are involved in citizen science.

What would you like?

And we would love to hear from you genuinely if people, everyone here just goes out and observes the night sky, what do you want them to find for you?

Because I know that you're very, very lazy and can't be bothered to do it yourself.

I think there's two things for everyone to do.

Everyone should go and see the space station and wave at it because I think that's just something everyone should do.

So NASA have a spot the station website, go there, look for times where it's visible, go out and wave at the space station.

And if it's cloudy, come back in, go to the Zooniverse website, and we've got fresh galaxies, some of which are blobs from the JWST that no one has ever seen before, and we need help classifying them.

Okay, and that's and of course, as well as this episode of them going out on radio for around Christmas time, that beautiful thing when you think, well, I didn't see Santa's sleigh, but I did see the ISS more often than not on Christmas.

It's such a wonderful thing to see.

Right, anyway, so remember there are bonus points if you spot Brian explaining something from a very great height for his television audience.

Brian, by the way, what is the highest you've ever been with trying to explain the universe?

I can't remember, man.

Thank you for listening.

There we are.

Now, nice again.

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