Continuing on the theme Science, we have Stargazing Live with comedian Dara O'Brien and the physicist Professor Brian Cox. Dara is a great stand up comedian who also hosts BBC Mock the Week, a quiz show program featuring comedians talking about current events. Brian Cox has made a number of documentaries on Physics and works at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.
As far as choosing the two hosts of a program aimed at promoting amateur astronomy, you could not have chosen any better. Dara plays the hapless celebrity interested in science and Brian plays th expert who provides the answers. But it is not all according to standard script: Dara demonstrates that he is a man of above intelligence in his approach to astronomy: not for nothing is he a very successful stand up comedian. A man of large proportions, (they use his head for Earth to explain eclipses!), he is usually a formidable presence on screen and on stage. As anyone who has seen MTW will attest how he works very hard to make intelligent comedy. He is one of those comedians who would not make cheap jokes at the expense of scientists.
I do not know why Brian Cox does not dabble at comedy, his screen presence is so compelling. He is a very youngish looking man with the air of an up and coming Carl Sagan. Come to think of it, he does resemble a young Sagan in his boyish good looks. If you have seen him on TV before, you would remember his childlike enthusiasm about the world around us and how to make sense of it through Science. On any given day he is the the most informed and intelligent man in the room and yet what makes him distinguished is his evident humility. Knowledge, it seems, makes the truly wise truly humble.
The whole program is divided into three episodes. I am going to talk about episode one today. I believe each episode deserves a separate space for discussion. They are all an hour long each.
Episode one begins at the Jodrell Bank Observatory of the University of Manchester. We are told that tt is the largest telescope in the UK. While Dara and Brian are freezing standing on a field, the action moves to another member of the team, Liz Bonnin who is standing at a volcano crater in Hawaii.
Dara and Brian point out the brightest and largest twinkling object in the night sky, the planet Jupiter. It is is big that despite being more than 370 million miles away we can still see it with the naked eye. We learn about the many features of the planet: a diameter of 88 thousand miles that spins every 9 hours and 56 minutes. A giant ball of gas and liquid it takes 12 years to circle the sun. It is fulll if gigantic storms, the biggest being the Red Spot, three times larger than the earth.
Jupiter has 63 moons but the largest four are the ones you can see by with a regular telescope. They are each distinct in their geological features. The closest to Jupiter is Io- the most volcanically active body in the Solar System. Constant eruptions give its surface a sulfurous appearance. By contrast, Europa is covered under a sheet of ice, underneath of which there may be salt water, capable of supporting life. Ganymede surface consists ice and rocky material and is larger than planet Mercury. Callisto is thought to be the oldest surface in the Solar System and bears the mark of four and a half billion years of impacts in the form of craters.
A nice little anecdote for the audience: apparently a Soviet lunar probe landed on the moon in 1964 and beamed back the information to Moscow. Jodrell Bank intercepted the message and was abel to print it out on a teleprinter machine. They don't make space rivalry like they used to.
Two images of Jupiter are shown, taken from the Hubble Telescope, one recent and one two summers ago. We see that the storm band of Jupiter had disappeared in the recent picture.
Hilarity ensues when we see Jonathan Ross (Woss) make an appearance. He apparently possesses three telescopes but cannot make them work. Mark Thompson goes to his house and shows him how to work the telescopes properly. They work on the telescope in the dark and Jonathan gets to see Jupiter and its four moons (we begin to see a pattern of the episode).
The action moves to Hawaii where Liz shows us the observatory in Mauna Kea and interviews local NASA head honcho. She also looks into the stargazing patterns and early astronomy practices of the local Hawaiians who relied upon them for navigation.
Dara goes on a mission to find out if Sci-Fi movies got their science correct. Star Wars. Star Trek. Independence Day: all of them disappoint in their incorrect depiction of the scientific reality. But they are still good rollicking fun!
Brian goes on an exploration talking about the nature of gravity and why planets are all sphere shaped. He explains how Earth became a planet through gradual accumulation of mass from the cloud of rocks. Each impact on Earth delivers energy, making it hot enough to melt the core, helping the formation of a sphere. It takes a certain amount of mass for it to become a sphere, however. We see several moons, Phobos of Mars and Hyperion of Saturn which are not spherical shaped.
Liz goes on an trip to see the volcanoes of Hawaii and we see a comparison with the volcanoes of Mars. In particular, we see a physical comparison between Kilauea of Hawaii with the Olympus Mons of Mars, the latter being many times larger than the former. She goes into a field of live molten lava coming out of the Earth's core. It's still glowing orange.
Mark Thompson shows us how to take a picture of the night sky. We see the weather report on clouds over UK and there is an anticipation for the partial solar eclipse the next day.
The next episode is going to be about the Sun. Looking forward to it. Great show, I must say!
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