Astrophiz Podcasts

Astrophiz 197: Dt Ian Musgrave’s August SkyGuide Moon Phases for August New Moon - 4 August - best for seeing the faint fuzzies and clusters Apogee Moon furthest from Earth - 9 August 1st Quarter Moon - 13 August Full Moon - 20 August Perigee Moon closest to Earth - 21 August Last Quarter Moon - 26 August Evening Sky Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan is binocular-visible in Leo. Mercury is a fine sighting early in the evenings in August near the Western horizon. Mercury, Regulus and Venus are visible till an hour after sunset On the 6th, Mercury, Regulus and Venus form a triangle with the thin crescent moon. Venus is climbing higher and becoming more prominent as the ‘Evening Star' Saturn is rising about 8:30 in the evening and is best telescopically a few hours later when it is higher. Saturns Rings are almost edge on at the moment. Morning Sky Mars has been heading towards Jupiter and the horizon, and in the first week of August lands in the constellation Taurus, forming a second red ‘eye’ with Aldaba

Today we have a brilliant interview for you as we speak with a fabulous Early Career Researcher, Dr Lauren Rhodes from the University of Oxford. Lauren has just published a paper on the BOAT … the Brightest Object of All Time … a “Once in 10,000 year event” The blast, called GRB 221009A, was over 100 billion times brighter than the sun. Lauren works in powerful collaborations which use a variety of radio interferometers, such as MeerKAT and e-MERLIN to study the radio emissions from explosive celestial events including jets from X-ray binaries and gamma ray bursts. She is using multi wavelength observations of these sources to understand each event's jet physics and its surrounding environment. This stunning episode is available free from Audible Podcasts, Soundcloud, Apple podcasts and Youtube MP3 links and a full transcript for those who may prefer to read our interview, is published on Astrophiz.com

Astrophiz 195: Dr Ian Musgrave’s July SkyGuide Dr Ian Musgrave brings us your July SkyGuide … telling us when, where and what to look for in the evening and morning skies this month. And July is again also a wonderful month for celestial observers, especially the early risers amongst us :) As usual Ian gives us 'Ian's Tangent' … and this month it’s all about the ‘Comet Ferret’, Charles Messier, and his famous catalog of 13 comets and 110 iconic ‘Messier Objects’ now known to be galaxies, nebulae and globular clusters. See if you can spot the ‘False Comet’ in the tail of Scorpius. Then Ian gives us his ‘Astrophotography Challenge’ where he presents us with an achievable and challenging task to undertake with our cameras. This month our challenge is to capture the occultation of the Mulayndynang/Pleiades cluster by the moon on Tuesday July 30 PLUS: July's Observing Highlights:

Today we have a brilliant show for you as we speak with Associate Professor Duncan Galloway from Monash University in Australia. His research involves the rarest, most powerful and cataclysmic events that occur in our universe ... Neutron stars colliding!

Astrophiz 193: Dr Ian Musgrave’s June SkyGuide Dr Ian Musgrave brings us his June SkyGuide … telling us when, where and what to look for in the evening and morning skies this month. And June is also a wonderful month for celestial observers, especially the early risers amongst us :) As usual Ian gives us his ‘Tangent’ … and this month it’s all about how animals respond to celestial appearances and then he gives us his ‘Astrophotography Challenge’ where he presents us with an achievable and challenging task to undertake with our cameras. This month our challenge is to capture Saturn as it is occulted by the moon.

Today we're speaking with Dr. Marcus Lower, who is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Australia's National Science Agency, the CSIRO. His research primarily focuses on pulsars … rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit beams of electromagnetic radiation from their magnetic poles. He's the principal investigator of a Pulsar Timing Project, which uses the CSIRO, Parkes Murriyang radio telescope to understand the long-term behaviour of neutron stars and how they can be used to study the interstellar medium. Marcus is the lead author in a just-published Nature Astronomy paper using the 64-meter Parkes-Murriyang dish and also the monster 76-meter Lovell Telescope at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Manchester to reveal really mystifying behaviours of Pulsar XTE J1810-197, which we have never seen anything remotely like this before.

Astrophiz 191: May SkyGuide Dr Ian Musgrave brings us his May SkyGuide … telling us when, where and what to look for in the evening and morning skies this month. And May is a wonderful month for celestial observers, especially the early risers amongst us :) As usual Ian gives us his ‘Tangent’ … and this month it’s all about the depiction of Comets throughout history and then he gives us his ‘Astrophotography Challenge’ where he presents us with an achievable and challenging task to undertake with our cameras. This month our challenge is to capture Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks as it passes through the majestic Orion ’The Hunter’ Constellation,

Enjoy this great interview with Professor  Katie Auchettl, who is the Associate Professor of Astrophysics and Physics at Melbourne University.  Katie is an observational astrophysicist whose research focuses on the extreme death of stars. Katie has worked with a team of young astronomers on a sensational book for aspiring astrophysicists that’s just been freely published on the Archive (ArXiv) Server. The book is called: “Astronomy as a Field: A Guide for Aspiring Astrophysicists”  … and it is sensational …. and I can't recommend it highly enough for any student … any person …. who has an interest in astronomy …. It’s a springboard to the stars and sure to be ground zero to many brilliant careers for aspiring astrophysicists …           Get your free pdf copy at tinyurl-DOT-com/aspiringastro Katie is also currently the PI of a large Australian Research Council grant project looking at  Tidal Disruption Events …  known affectionately as TDEs, where stars get ripped apart by supermassive black holes. We ev

Welcome to the April SkyGuide: Dr Ian Musgrave is telling us when, where and what to look for in the evening and morning skies in April. He also gives us his ‘Tangent' about Fungi and Lichen on the ISS. This month Ian continues his 'Astrophotography Challenge’ where he presents us with an achievable and challenging task to undertake with simple cameras. Our target for April is Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks ... and he gives us some excellent tips to capture this celestial Dragon. Are you up for it?

Professor Orsola De Marco is a Professor at Macquarie University and Deputy-Director of the  Astrophysics and Space Technologies Research Centre at Macquarie University in Sydney. She obtained her PhD at University College London as a Perren Scholar, after which she was a Swiss National Science Foundation research fellow at ETH Zurich, a FUSE Fellow at University College London and Asimov Fellow at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. She was an ARC Future Fellow. Her research focusses on stellar interactions and how they alter the structure and evolution of stars in multiple systems.

Dr Ian Musgrave brings us his March SkyGuide …  telling us when, where and what to look for in the evening and morning skies this month. He also gives us his ‘Tangent’ about perigee and apogee Moons. Also Ian is continuing his ‘Astrophotography Challenge’ where he presents us with an achievable and challenging task to undertake with our cameras. This month it's imaging Vesta and learning how to use the free Deep Sky Stacker software

Today listeners, we’re zooming over 10 timezones to Denmark for some cutting edge science …, and you're invited to a very special conversation with Dr Hannah Diamond-Lowe who is a senior researcher in the Exoplanet Group at the National Space Institute, Technical University of Denmark … where her groundbreaking research characterizes small exoplanet atmospheres using ground- and space-based observatories. She is also the Principal Investigator of the Hot Rocks Survey, a large observing program using the James Webb Space Telescope to test terrestrial rocky exoplanets for their atmospheres as they orbit nearby M-dwarf stars, as well as the companion program Hot Rock Stars, which will measure the UV output of the M dwarf hosts with Hubble.

Dr Ian Musgrave kicks off 2024 with his February SkyGuide telling us when, where and what to look for in the evening and morning skies in February. He gives us a Tangent about perigee and apogee Moons. This year Ian is introducing his 'Astrophotography Challenge' wher ehe presents us with an achievable and challenging task to undertake with our cameras.

Astrophiz 184: Hyerin Cho Meet Hyerin Cho, an inspiring young astrophysicist from Korea who is doing her PhD at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hyerin uses her formidable computational skills to simulate still-mysterious black holes using supercomputers, as well as revealing the mysteries and enigmatic fast radio bursts AKA FRBs. For her main research, she produces simulations of plasma accreting onto black holes and is on an already successful quest to discover what really makes these wonderful phenomena tick and how galaxies and their central black holes interact with each other, regardless of their relative size. An amazing researcher making supermassive discoveries!

Dr. Rebecca Davies is an Astro3D postdoctoral researcher and has just been awarded an ARC-DECRA fellowship at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Rebecca researches the stuff that flows out of Galaxies AKA ‘Galactic Outflows’ … and she looks across the majority of the history of the universe from right now and right back through time to less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Rebecca uses spectroscopic data from Hubble, JWST … the Awesome James Webb Space Telescope and the VLT, the Very Large Telescope which consists of a optical array of four 8.2 m telescopes high up in the Atacama desert in Chile. From these data, Rebecca is creating new understandings of how Galaxies evolve, filling in some of those gaps in our knowledge, and her Honours and PhD students are in multiple research groups on related quests to understand galactic evolution. Now, when not doing Astrophysics. Rebecca can most likely be found bike riding or playing violin … and she's currently a violinist

Moon Phases: November 5 - the Last Quarter Moon is Sunday, good time for evening skygazing. November 7 - The Moon is at apogee, when it is furthest from the Earth November 13 - New Moon, good time for skygazing the entire night. November 14 - The very thin ‘day old’ moon is near Mercury in the west just after sunset. A genuine challenge to catch this. November 20 - First Quarter Moon, great binocular moon gazing time, with Saturn nearby. November 22 - The Moon is at perigee, when it is closest from the Earth. November 25 - Jupiter is only 2 degrees away from the waxing moon. November 27 - Full Moon. Evening Sky: Saturn is nice and high in evening skies and always a joy to observe in the north. On 23 November, Saturn casts its deepest shadow over its rings …. well worth a look, or a photo. Jupiter is bright all night long all the month, and on November 2 - Opposition of Jupiter, Mercury returns to evening skies from mid-month onwards, and easily visible in the west towards the end of the month. Morning S

Today’s special episode is from your host, Brendan O’Brien, and is all about ­­the amazing James Webb Space Telescope: “Unveiling the Cosmos” Our story begins in a remote, microscopic corner in the vast expanse of the cosmos, where humankind has always yearned to uncover its deepest mysteries. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) represents a monumental leap in our quest to explore the universe. From its conception as an ambitious dream in the early 1990's … to its launch on Christmas Day 2021, … it’s successful deployment and calibration has resulted in the mind-boggling imagery that it is constantly beaming back down to us; the JWST has already been a testament to human ingenuity, perseverance, and the unquenchable pursuit of new knowledge. This is for our regular listeners, new listeners, space enthusiasts, and those with a curious heart.

Show Notes: Morning Sky Two beautiful bright planets will reward those who get up early in the mornings this month. Jupiter is is rising before midnight but is still best in the morning sky, it is close to the Moon on October 1 and on the 29th. Venus is moving from crescent to half moon phase and climbs higher the morning twilight coming very close to the bright star Regulus by weeks end. Partial penumbral lunar eclipse on October 28 is difficult to observe in central Australia and impossible in eastern states, but is fully visible from WA where the maximum eclipse is at 5:13am. The Moon occultation of the Pleiades (the 7 Sisters, not far from the bright star Aldabaran between about midnight and 01:24 am on 31 October depending on your location. Stars & Constellations Scorpius is setting in the west. Sagittarius is still a feature The globular cluster M22 is always worth catching Southern Cross is also a great feature to view. The LMC is reasonably high in the sky, and there is a move to have the Magell

Today we are speaking with Dr Daniel Palumbo, from the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Daniel is an astrophysicist and data scientist with the Event Horizon Telescope who worked on those amazing black hole images using data from the planet-sized telescope, the EHT, the Event Horizon Telescope. He is involved in ongoing work on the Next Generation EHT consortium In this episode he shares his science journey, how the EHT works and how he worked with the imaging teams to produce those two historic and stunning black hole images from our Milky Way Galactic Center, Sagittarius A* and the more distant supermassive black hole in Messier 87* Brilliant science beautifully explained. Thanks Daniel.

Your planetary action is split between the evening and morning skies. Venus and Mercury return to the morning twilight. Mars is a dim glowing ember in the evening skies. Saturn is just past opposition and still high in evening skies Jupiter enters evening skies, but still look better in morning skies. Moon Phases: Last quarter moon: September 7, ideal for stargazing Moon at apogee: September 15. New moon: September 16, also ideal for stargazing First quarter moon: September 23. Moon at perigee: September 28. Full moon: September 29. Earth is at its Spring Equinox on September 23 for the Southern Hemisphere and the Autumn/Fall Equinox for the Northern Hemisphere. Evening skies Saturn is still nice and high, big and bright in the evening sky. Mars is sinking lower and will be near the moon on the 16th and 17th of September Mercury is only visible in the evening twilight in the first week of September, before returning to the morning twilight and will be down close to the horizon thus difficult to see