Podcasts

The Geminids is one of the most prolific meteor showers of the year. Credit: Pete Lawrence

Radio Astronomy Podcast Meteor showers and space rocks

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Episode 4: Farewell Rosetta

This magnificent 360-degree panoramic image, covering the entire southern and northern celestial sphere, reveals the cosmic landscape that surrounds our tiny blue planet. This gorgeous starscape serves as the first of three extremely high-resolution images featured in the GigaGalaxy Zoom project, launched by ESO within the framework of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009). The plane of our Milky Way Galaxy, which we see edge-on from our perspective on Earth, cuts a luminous swath across the image. The projection used in GigaGalaxy Zoom place the viewer in front of our Galaxy with the Galactic Plane running horizontally through the image — almost as if we were looking at the Milky Way from the outside. From this vantage point, the general components of our spiral galaxy come clearly into view, including its disc, marbled with both dark and glowing nebulae, which harbours bright, young stars, as well as the Galaxy’s central bulge and its satellite galaxies. As filming extended over several months, objects from the Solar System came and went through the star fields, with bright planets such as Venus and Jupiter. For copyright reasons, we cannot provide here the full 800-million-pixel original image, which can be requested from Serge Brunier. The high resolution image provided here contains 18 million pixels.

Podcast: The mission to map the Milky Way

Can you spot each of Patrick Moore's top galaxies to see in the night sky during autumn?

What next for Patrick Moore’s house?

A total solar eclipse as seen from Apollo 11. Credit: NASA

Radio Astronomy Shorts – Episode 1: Dava Sobel

An image of Rho Ophiuchi, a star-forming region in which traces of organic molecule methyl isocyanate (inset) has been found. Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2/L. Calçada

Podcast: Lord Martin Rees

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Podcast from the South West Astronomy Fair