News and Updates Archives - Urban Astronomer

Welcome to episode 35 of the Urban Astronomer Podcast! This week we have a full show for you, with our main feature being an interview with South African astronomer Dr Itumeleng Monageng. We also continue our series on the physics behind the evolution of a star from gas cloud to black hole.  And finally, my new co-host Clem Unger brings us updates on current space missions. Itumeleng Monageng Itumeleng is a post-grad researcher working for the South African Astronomical Observatory and talks about his research interests, how he came to be an astronomer, and more. Earlier this year, he was featured in a short promotional video for SAAO, which is how I heard about him. He very kindly agreed to do the same thing for us! Stellar Physics Last time we looked at our star, on its journey towards becoming a black hole, we took a detour to categorise different types of stars that form at different masses. Today we see what happens when a medium-sized star, like our own Sun, runs out of Hydrogen Mission Updates Clem Unger brings us up to date with news and updates about current space programs and missions. Today he talks about NASA's 60th birthday, the Hayabusa 2 landers, OSIRIS REx, and the Parker Solar Probe. He also mentions some interesting launches coming up in October. Links Itumeleng Monageng on Twitter Clem Unger on Twitter Allen Versfeld on Twitter

Welcome to the 31st episode of the Urban Astronomer Podcast. This episode features an interview with Clem Unger, an ambassador for the OSIRIS-REx mission who lives in Australia. This is followed by the next part of our series on the evolution of stars, taking us one step closer on our journey to seeing where supernovae come from. Clem Unger A few weeks back, I spoke to Clem Unger, who lives in Australia and serves in his spare time in the ambassador program for the OSIRIS-REx mission, which will be arriving at the asteroid Bennu in December this year, although it begins its approach in just over a month from the time this episode airs. Clem is an amateur astronomer like myself, and I'm hoping to bring him back to the show for future episodes. Stellar Evolution: Different sizes This is a short segment this week. We revise a few points behind how those big diffuse gas clouds collapse into stars. This leads us to understand how the size of the cloud leads directly to the size of the newly created star. Different size stars burn in different ways, and fit into distinct types. We look specifically at Brown Dwarfs, Red Dwarfs and Yellow Dwarfs.   Links OSIRIS-REx NASA

Welcome to the 14th episode of the Urban Astronomer podcast, after a long and sustained quiet spell. Now I know how this looks: New podcast pumps out a bunch of episodes, and then loses steam before eventually just going silent one day. We've all seen it, we all know the signs. But don't worry, I've been very busy behind the scenes, lining up a whole stack of interesting people to interview, and you'll be able to hear them all in the coming weeks. We've got some top-shelf astrophotographers coming up, a guy who suddenly got a little bit famous by taking on the flat earth crowd in a live interview on YouTube, and even one of my old astronomy lecturers from university! Today's guest, though, is a lot less interesting: We'll be talking to me. My darling wife and occasional co-host grabbed a microphone over the weekend and sat me down to ask me about myself, my website, my podcast, and what I'm trying to do with it all. But then disaster struck:  While recording the intro segments, I forgot to check my inputs!  Everything except the interview itself got recorded through the nasty microphone built into my webcam, so you'll have to pardon the sub-standard audio quality. We'll try not to let that happen again! Errata At one point, while discussing ancient historical astronomers, Allen says that he wrote an article on Aristarchus who was the first person to have measured the diameter of the Earth. He was actually thinking of Eratosthenes, who was mentioned here: How do we know that the Earth is round?  Also, a stadia is closer to 170 meters in length!

Hi and welcome to the 7th episode of the Urban Astronomer Podcast! This episode was dropped in the middle of the Easter weekend, so in deference to the season we've got a brief segment based on one of Urban Astronomer's religiously themed articles: How is astronomy used to calculate the dates of religious festivals? And our feature item is another interview! This time around, I managed to get a hold of Neil Viljoen, who owns Telescope Shop, one of the few dedicated telescope and astronomy suppliers in Southern Africa. We met under the pretext of having him troubleshoot my primary telescope, and he very kindly agreed to let me record an interview with him in his workshop. Neil is not only a telescope salesman, but also a dedicated and hard-working astrophotographer - The judges at ScopeX awarded him the first prize in the 2015 astrophotography contest for his image of the famous HorseHead Nebula in Orion.  I have linked to the image below Links Telescope Shop Neil on Twitter Neil's winning astrophotography image Amateur Radio Astronomy project

Welcome to the 6th episode of the Urban Astronomer Podcast. This is the second part of our interview with Chris Stewart, one of the names behind the Amateur Telescope Making class in Johannesburg, one of the organisers of the annual ScopeX telescope and astronomy expo, and director of the Astronomical Society of South Africa's Instrumentation section. In this part, he talks about the pros and cons of different telescope designs, how to make them, how to select an eyepiece, and also offers solid advice for those who'd rather just buy a telescope. If you missed part one, you can download or listen to it here.

Welcome to the 5th episode of the Urban Astronomer Podcast! We're well on our way in the grand experiment of deciding how exactly to format the show, and today we're trying yet another combination! We'll start off by answering the question first asked in a classic Urban Astronomer article, one originally written back in 2010 and that's been consistently popular with our readers:  Will an astronaut explode if they take off their helmet? Our feature item introduces my new co-host, and wife of twelve years, Cathrine Versfeld. Cathrine has decades of experience in media and marketing, and was my co-host on our first podcast together: Now Look Here!, which was nominally about parenting but really just covered whatever a middle-aged couple felt like chatting about!  She returns to podcasting in this episode, with an introductory series on the planets.  This week she covers the smallest, and nearest planet to the Sun: Mercury. Next week's podcast episode will play the second part of my interview with Chris Stewart, so remember to tune in!  Or, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or your favourite podcatching software by following the links on the Subscription page.  And if you'd like to tell just one person about this show, that would just be amazing! Links: Video of spacesuit failure in a vacuum tank

Welcome to the 4th episode of the Urban Astronomer Podcast!  This episode features news about the discovery of an intermediate mass black hole, and the next in our series of interviews with prominent figures in South African amateur astronomy.  This weeks guest: Chris Stewart.The black hole discovery is important because up until now, astronomers have only ever detected black holes the sizes of stars, or the sizes of millions of stars.  Common sense tells us that there should be black holes sized between those two extremes, yet nobody's ever been able to find one.  Fortunately, that seems to have changed, thanks to the work of Bülent Kızıltan, Holger Baumgardt and Abraham Loeb, of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.  You can read more in their paper ( arXiv:1702.02149v1 [astro-ph.GA] ) which was published in Nature. The interview with Chris Stewart was recorded late last year, in Centurion, South Africa. Chris is the director of the Instrumentation Section of the Astronomical Society of South Africa, and has been intimately involved with the running of the annual ScopeX astronomy and telescope expo since it was founded in 2002.

Welcome to the Urban Astronomer podcast.  For the third time in a row, you're getting a show in a totally different format from before:  This time, it's a recording of one of my public lectures on astrophotography. In this case, it's a talk I gave to the local chapter of Mensa, the world-famous high IQ society.  I had gotten to know one of their officers a few years back when we were on the same pub-quiz team, and she contacted me a short while back.  The have regular meetings, at which experts on diverse topics give a short talk to the members and she wanted me to be that week's expert.  She knew that I was director of ASSA's astrophotography section, and figured I'd be the best person to talk to, not realising that it's more of an administrative post and that most of the section's contributing photographers are considerably better than I am.  Still, I have a good few year's experience behind me in astrophotography, and in fact the cover art for this podcast is one of my own photographs.  So I agreed to speak, and the recording of that talk features in this episode. The technical quality isn't great - the hall echoed and I suspect their recording was made through a different microphone to the one on the podium, but it's clear enough to hear what I'm saying.  And I've done my best to process it and clean it up a bit to improve the quality a bit, so hopefully you'll get something out of it!

As promised, a second episode of the Urban Astronomer Podcast!  This week I interviewed Auke Slotegraaf (and managed to mangle his name not once but twice - rather embarrassing) about astronomy, history, and more.  It runs a little long, at 50 minutes, but since that seems to be about the standard for interview-format podcasts, I don't feel too bad. Among the many hats Auke wears, he is involved with the Centre for Astronomical Heritage, a non-profit organization which aims to record, preserve, and disseminate information about, South Africa’s astronomical heritage.  If you have any interest in astronomy or history, I'd suggest you check them out.

Wow, we finally did it!  The podcast is alive, and this is the first episode!  In this episode, I cover probably the biggest astronomy news item of the year so far, and also read one of my more recent opinion pieces.  I know, you could just read it yourself, but it's something I feel quite passionate about, and wanted to let you hear it in my own voice. As long-time readers will know, this is something I've been threatening to do for ages.  I only got more excited when my beautiful wife and I bought a pair of USB headsets and sat down together to record 12 episodes of the Now Look Here! podcast, and figure out how the whole medium works. Since then I've invested in proper microphones and recording gear, and taken the time to really think about how to do a podcast properly.  I've read guides and articles by the professionals in the podcast production business.  I've listened to hundreds of episodes of world-class podcasts to try figure out what they do, in terms of scripting, production, and basic presentation technique, to make their shows so great.  And I've gone back and listened to my own recordings, to compare, and figure out where I should improve. So how did that work out for me?  Well... only you, dear audience member, can answer that one!  I can promise that I've tried to aim for a show that sounds at least slightly professional, that preserves Urban Astronomer's own unique style.  I'd also like for it to be updated as often as the website used to be, back in its hey-day.  It's an ambitious goal, since I tend to over-commit to too many projects, but you are in a unique position help me:  If you enjoy this podcast and want to hear more episodes, please reach out, via a comment below, or Facebook or twitter, and tell me so.  In fact, go a step further and demand more episodes. I assure you I won't be offended but will take it as praise and encouragement.  It will probably even go a long way to nudge me towards producing even better episodes, on schedule. Anyway, enough words.  You aren't here to read my text, but to listen to a show.  Enjoy, and remember to hit the "Subscribe" button!