The Infinite Monkey Cage - The Monkeys meet The Sky at Night

Episode Date: December 20, 2023

Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined by the longest running science show in the world, The Sky at Night, alongside comedian and astronomy enthusiast Dara O Briain for the ultimate guide to studying the stars from your own back garden. Sky At Night presenters Dr Maggie Aderin Pocock, Chris Lintott and Pete Lawrence join the panel to offer their top tips to backyard astronomy over the winter season. From binoculars to telescopes and even the naked eye: meteor showers, planetary moons and odd behaving galaxies are just some of the heavenly phenomena visible with or without equipment from the comfort of your own garden or local park. An out of this world seasonal special. And you can catch the monkey's on a special edition of the Sky At Night on BBC iplayer from November 13th.Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem

In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Tax is extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts.

Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Eames. And Brian is very, very excited about this week's The Infinite Monkey Cage. His head is just reeling with excitement because... 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-running 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 he played the xylophone angrily that night. Oh, he played the xylophone angrily that night. Pretty daring in that bikini as well. The first three series of Sky at Night, all of him wearing a sash as well.

Miss Selsie. 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 secreting 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. 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... Yeah, we have the biggest errors in the universe. So, you know, 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 Lintott. 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 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 out standing 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 um 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 meter telescope because now with an eight meter telescope you should put things far far far away

but because i'm an instrument builder uh one day we were trying to calibrate the instrument we needed a nice extended object so we looked at the moon with an eight meter telescope and it was amazing I'm Dara O'Briain I'm a clown and essentially and a back garden astronomer and a photographer 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. And this is our panel.

Right, before we get to 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. Yes. What was his kind of expectations of Professor Brian Cox? There was some muttering. So Patrick was sitting there going,

well, I think I've met this Cox fellow. I think he's OK, but he is a particle physicist. So it was viewed with suspicion, I think I've met this Cox fellow. I think he's OK, but he is a particle physicist. So it was viewed with suspicion, I think, because, as we know, particle physicists just collide things. They don't pay attention to the universe. Very, very accurate. Yeah, and there was increasing levels of chuntering 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 5am and he, 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 don't want to. I was 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 Patrickrick he stole my supervisor's trousers that's definitely the title of the autobiography with the phil collins maggie what do you think it is uh uh 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, they're going, you really... The clangers did play its part, didn't they? Oh, definitely. In fascination. 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 is 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.

But 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 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 learned about archaeoastronomy. And if you look back, and actually there's a 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. 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 grew up in London and we were 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 the problem of course with London is that you can see about eight stars essentially on a clear night yeah because uh I really got into it very seriously at the uh 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 this stuff or we could just meet the people from Cassini who will send us school images and they'll just, oh 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 this stage and actually do this properly. But, yeah, the problem with doing it in London,

as anyone familiar with 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 plough

and there's Orion and it is just those 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, the Scranton. You'll go out, you'll be cold, you'll hear the sound of foxes copulating. And noisy. And noisy, aren't they? They really are.

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

Yeah, I went a bit bananas on the whole thing. And I would say the path, and I find this constantly recommended, 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 i remember and i it is on it's on camera me seeing um saturn for the first time because it's the very first thing we did in the very first stargazing live is i ran across the field and mark thompson had a setup involving a camera and he said look into this and he had rehearsed me oh no during the day and i would never leave port and i would look into it that's. But obviously the thing wasn't there. And so I said, I don't know 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. You see, what I love about that is the idea that light is coming from the sun, travelling huge distances in space, billions of kilometres, 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, 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 round around you see the phases changing you suddenly realize that we're on this 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 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 lockdown, like 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, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, if you like, and Rigel and the belt in between,

looked weird because Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, if you like, and Rigel and the belt in between, looked weird because Betelgeuse 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, and then it came back steadily and gradually. But that connection to just being able to go and look 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 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 know your garden and you see the sky change, that's... We wanted to start to talk, Peter, about that. 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... It was finding the stars and starting to recognise the stars and then recognising 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 the four brightest moons of Jupiter quite clearly through a small telescope but it's really simple things as well like if 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 it makes me feel sick when i do it because i know what the 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's all about the experience of looking as well with the moon in particular there's this thing called the moon illusion yes which is people always have you 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 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. In a 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 hindbrain 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. Didn't I read somewhere that if you stand on your head, it goes away? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, if you stand on your head, I promise this? Yeah, that's right. I promise this is true. Next time 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... 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 yeah absolutely a very cheap telescope 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

that doesn't sound right yeah we just yeah yeah we've reached a great divide here it's you versus everyone else 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. 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 telescope. That sounds quite kind of like fetishising 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, a bit nippy now, I might nip in. Oh, let's go again later. They're just very ready and able. And so, yes, usually for me, it's a 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, OK. But also... I just had this... It's like the leaping nuns in Pete and Dud, isn't it? Things are revealed 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 hit and dud, isn't it? Things are revealed 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, Dara, isn't there, when you get a pair of binoculars, which is the easiest

and cheapest way in, I suppose. Yeah, absolutely. Because you will see detail being uncovered. And it is an impressive thing. Yes, obviously then you can carry on with the journey. But I think it is a 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 plough, and if I look through binoculars, suddenly I'm seeing a lot more than that, because it is grabbing photons. And suddenly you go, oh, hello. It's like a curtain being pulled back. And more curtains can be pulled back. And with binoculars as well,

two eyes is easier than one. You learn the skill of looking, as you well know, Pete, you learn the skill of looking through a telescope and doing that. But I love the idea, just going 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 look for for clusters and it's not sort of targeted i'm not an astrophotographer but it's just a way of quickly connecting to this i i get that but that that i think is part of the issue um if you're trying to get into it in a in a deeper way that you want

to be able to focus on the things which you're really looking for it's three one piece a lot of people you have got a telescope stall at greenwich Market. The bloke who sells the binoculars is currently beating you. We understand how this works. But they're rubbish. I just wanted to pick up on something you said, Chris. You said just with binoculars, you scan down the Milky Way in the summer and you start to see clusters. 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 is there's the constellation of cassiopeia which is this w or m shape in the sky so it's near the plow it's reasonably easy to to look at it's at the 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 that 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've formed together

and they haven't yet dispersed so some of these objects are a bit like our sun's family would have been maybe 4 billion years ago or something like that so we're picking out the early stages of new stellar creation in the Milky Way

Isn't it 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. And 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 cities of young stars.

It's beautiful. It does, and it's evocative. And yeah, I remember Feynman here, because he was talking about a flower. And his friend said, oh, you scientists, you see 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 gives me goosebumps.

Well, that's the different layers I was interested because, you know, because Doris, 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 the point 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 my beautiful feeling? But then I would recognise specifically the plough.

And then I remember going on holiday and seeing the plough again and just being warmed by the fact that this is a thing which is permanent in the sky and that you'll see it from all over the world. And that is a glorious thing. 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 of the crater of a moon. Or it'll hook you in of seeing the rings, which is relative. 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, people are going to be purists 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, which is our ability to take in an image, which is faint and renewing and means that there's stuff we can't see because we can't gather 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 that that psychological effect like we did a gig in in a back garden in northampton didn't we and the iss went over and all that kind of that's the difference between you and me baron you do the o2 in london and chris and me do back gardens in northampton they do sell out every time all 15 chairs went didn't they but it was but that experience because i think again the more knowledge that that moment where you can just enjoy the stars to revel in that light

but then to when you find out that it's hydrogen becoming helium and it's because 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 is something that really seems to stir you to think when we're looking back in time. And I think that does, even when you're not consciously thinking about that, 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 could 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 for millions of years and hit the eyeball that's impressive.

But also 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 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 was 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 can we sorry i just can 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 it ruins the Orion Nebula. Once that's

in your head, 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 someone talk poetically about it, I go, no, vroom, vroom 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, no, I had to strike.

But I love that. Once you imagine something, you see these things. You know, Herschel and Co, in the 1970s, 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 um 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 uh poncho hypothesis is new but i will see it

differently i love the fact you've actually called it the motorbike poncho hypothesis yeah we could get at least a couple of postdocs funding out of that in our new podcast nature answers rural stories from a changing planet we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change we will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature and good news it is working learn more by listening to nature answers wherever you get your podcast. 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 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 the opposite part you can see is the planet uh jupiter which is coming to opposition when it's 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 uh the middle of november on the nightth, the 17th, 18th, you've got the Leonid meteor shower. 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 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. And you don't even need a trampoline. Not compulsory. But the glass of wine is. And the glass of wine does help. When's the next Leonid storm? Is it 2030? About 2030. It was 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 sty, even if it's cloudy. Because that I

want to see. What year was that? There were a few... 1999. 1999, 2000, 2001, there were a few. 1999. 1999, 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 you know what you're led to expect from Hollywood right if you see a meteor shower. People expect fireworks. Yeah exactly. But I have experienced that with some of the other mainstream meteor showers. The Perseids, 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. Bits of 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 primordial feel to it as you're watching these things coming down. 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 eye. It's like, damn it, missed! Maybe, Maggie, just pick up on that. Bits of comet. Yeah, yeah. People will have heard that and thought, what do you mean bits of comet?

And also, why is it that in 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 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 trail and as those tiny bits or as pete says those grain sized pieces burn up on the atmosphere they will form these uh meteor showers and yeah and as i say depending on what they're made of they could be different colors uh and yes depending on how the Earth is passing through them will depend on the intensity of that meteor shower. So sometimes you're right in the heart of it, so you get many, many shooting stars,

and nothing to do with stars, a horrible misnomer. And sometimes you pass at the edge of it, so you don't get 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 um for example with the 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. We should say, because this is 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 think that should give 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 to big telescopes. I sort of build space telescopes, actually, like 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.

Yes. And that was someone observing, an amateur observing. Something 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. 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. It 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 and off for years, man, we overpromise in this subject so much. We really do. Because we produce the most beautiful images and we bring them out and they're things in space or things we put 40 hours of imaging into. And I think people have occasion to 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, is that just a leaf or am I seeing a anything there? I'm not sure if I'm seeing it. Is that just a leaf or am I seeing 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, the time you pass a fuzzy dot, you're really excited about a fuzzy dot. I can't wait. There's an entire classification system in the Messier, 107 whatever Messier, 107 Fuzzy Dots. And the Messier said, these are all, what are you reaching?

He was looking for comets. He was looking for comets. He thought they were comets. Things that 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 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 that But I think that's one of the challenges With space science Because the Hubble space telescope takes glorious images The James Webb space telescope takes glorious images

People look at those and think Because they're not as glorious JWST 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 it's about the idea of what you're right, Dara. 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 basically, 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.

Can we just talk about telescopes? Because we've talked about the naked eye, we've talked about binoculars. When we talk about amateur telescopes, if someone's interested, what kind of telescopes are out there? What would be a starter telescope? How much are we talking about? What are the things that really matter?

It used to be really easy. I remember there was a telescope. It was in the Exchange and Mart. Do you remember that? 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 half a binocular, but you can put it on a platform so it's easy to use.

But there's also, I think there's two divisions. There's lenses and mirrors. And small lenses have become very good, where if you want to see the faint fuzzy stuff that dara dislikes then big mirrors are helpful don't get me wrong i love that stuff don't don't think that when you buy your telescope you're going to see in glorious incredible that makes sense so so mirrors 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 maybe something like a dobsonian, which is essentially a big bucket with a mirror at the bottom that you plonk and then you can have maybe something like a dobsonian, 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 it's a pointless exercise the two pieces of advice whenever i say i always say i started with a short fat tube uh

which is good for solar systems and the moon and stuff like that like whatever because it cuts it it's a smaller image rather than pulling it anyway but the short fat tube is good uh as a start one because i 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's available and not and there's a number of really great shops

whether it's First Light Optics or Rother Optics or Harris, there's loads of these shops run by people who are really into this and it's almost unique in not having, there's no chain selling telescopes really the yeah you have you you end up in the in the warm embrace of people who are really into this absolutely what i'd recommend yeah 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've got a newbie. Come see. But in a good way. Yes, they will invite you and show you different telescopes and you get a feel of them. Try before you buy. That's why the first time I saw Saturn through a telescope was 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, would you be interested? 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 that sense of excitement.

And then, as you said as well, Dara, there is, however small it might appear to be, however 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 is something. 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 were queuing up to look through 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 issa mission control in darmstadt and it was the evening that the hoygan's probe had been dropped off by cassini and had landed on saturn's largest moon titan and the queue of people that the hoygan's probe had been dropped off by cassini and had

landed on saturn's largest moon titan and the queue of people 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 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 really 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 comet 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, 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 realised I was seeing something that nobody in history had knowingly seen before. Apart from, you know, 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. 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, 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'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 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 is 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 we're not doing the intergalactic bees this time it's too much of a revelation for the audience but that was that was just stunning to see and and that remains my favourite, I think. Yeah, I think for me, it's going to be the moon again. But I remember sort of... Just following the moon.

Like you, Darwin, you sort of go out and put the rubbish... Oh, look, there's the moon. 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 about 13, 14, going out and looking up at the moon and thinking, that's not right. The phase of the moon isn't right. And it freaked me

out. I don't understand. It was close to full 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 realised 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 a lunar eclipse happens, I can actually see it and 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 Stargazer. I remember. You bought the camera. I bought the camera in the airport. Absolutely. You brought me, you held my hand as you went into Curry's

in the airport and I bought the camera there. And I brought it over and the guy got me, he held my hand as we went into Curry's in the airport and I brought a camera there. And I brought it over and the guy got me, he sold me a tripod as well and it was all very nice and I was in this amazing place called Siding Springs

which is, you know, it's built for night time versus day time and we're in the canteen area of it and there's a guy I'm just chatting to there, he was from Britain

and I'm chatting with him and he said, what are you doing? I said, I'm going to go out and take a few shots and then he went, oh, well, good luck, he said. And I said, oh, thanks very much and I walked off and I met you and what are you doing? I said, I'm going to go out and take a few shots. And then he went, oh, well, good luck, he said.

And I said, oh, thanks very much. And I walked off and I met you. And I said, yeah, no, I'm just going to go. I was just talking to that guy over there. And you said, that's David Mallon. He's the inventor of color astrophotography. This is the guy who invented the technique of RGB, which you get all of the images and the father of it all.

And I said, I shall go and talk to him again. And I sat down and chatted to this guy, born in Bury, as far as I remember. So 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 the tripod take a rucksack with you fill up a can of beer hang the rucksack from underneath the tripod

it will steady the tripod and make a better photograph then drink the beer yeah both you and the tripod become more unstable until eventually you've drunk all the beer it's time to go in. That was technical advice number one. And the other one he did which is another thing that you can do which is very pleasant to do

is called a star trail where you basically set up a camera with 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 DSLR camera that's very easy to do. And he said I did that poster he said and there's a famous poster of Silent Springs which is an 11 hour star trail so it's almost the entire way around for all these arcs of light

it's an incredible image, I said oh my god that must have been incredibly difficult to set, 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. 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 recognise what it is, and will punch it over. So the greatest difficulty he had, he had to build 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 the 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 that. It's very much swings and roundabouts, when you gain and when you lose, and the other, really, to be honest, yeah. 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 clouds of dust. They called that the emu and called that something else. Because there's just so many stars. So in the 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 or 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 coming in, that is surprisingly easy to do and just works it's lovely if you are doing that and you're travelling, if you do that in different places you get a sense of 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 that for me that's the remarkable thing about astronomy, that at some point you get the sensation, a visceral sensation, that you are on a rock in a universe. And for me, actually, seeing a 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, the light bulb that went on when he saw those moons, because they're so obviously going around it that you suddenly feel that 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. Well, how's your colleague? Uranus was George Hume's... It was, yeah. He was called 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. 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 Lintot 1 and waiting until next day to get online and discover it's ngc 1981 it was discovered in the 17th century 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 live in manchester you've got the greatest collection of people who've said the words well unfortunately it's cloudy tonight 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. 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, you get an ionised 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 a city,

even when it's cloudy. That's fantastic how did that image of you stood on a plinth in the park as well as a loudspeaker so i could broadcast it to the people yeah your ego after lynn top one my own living statue i'm 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 have 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 TARDIS. What have you got, Dara?

Somebody says, Earth from a parallel universe so I can find my cat. What would that help you? Is it logical? I don't understand that. Yeah, it's interesting because I would have presumed in a parallel universe the cat may or may not have survived. That feels like a multiverse thing rather than a... Is it a multiverse

reference? 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. It's getting revealed that he's more replicant than human being. Does anybody understand that?

Well, I think it depends on how the cat went missing. If that had happened because of a particular quantum event, then perhaps there's some logic. That may be the branching point that created the power. He's not hot, it's true. 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 to both of you. So, thank you very much to our guests, Chris Lintock, Maggie Daring-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 13th, or on BBC iPlayer. And we're off for a couple of months,

so we thought it would 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 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 um everyone should go and see the space station and wave at it because i think that's just something 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 because I'm going on Radio 4 around Christmas time that 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 you know 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 while trying to explain the universe? I can't remember, man. Thank you for listening.

Good night. Thank you. There we are. Thank you. In the infinite monkey cage Without your trousers In the infinite monkey cage Turned out nice again. Who's in the news for all the wrong reasons?

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