The BBC is currently running a 3-part series called BBC Stargazing, hosted by Brian Cox and Dara O Briain. The last episode aired last night, sadly I didn’t have access from here in Germany. There’s lots of discussion and enthusiasm on twitter with the #BBCstargazing hashtag, and not just from the regular crowd of astronomers I follow. Combined with the partial solar eclipse visible from these parts this week, it’s a great week for getting people excited about the skies.
It made me think back fondly to 2003, when I took 6 weeks out of my PhD to work on a BBC programme called All Night Star Party, filmed at Jodrell Bank and on La Palma. A great experience, where I met lots of (weird &) wonderful people – including, briefly, Brian Cox, who was a guest on the programme – from both professional and amateur communities, and from the media.
For those who have mastered the stargazing skill, know their way around the night sky and want to take things further, a paper on astro-ph yesterday talks about the growing community of amateur astronomers who use commercial off-the-shelf spectroscopic instruments with their telescopes to do some cool science. The paper, presented by Thomas Eversberg of the self-founded Schnörringen Telescope Science Institute near Cologne at a conference on “Stellar winds in Interaction” in 2010, describes some of the spectrographs that are currently available to the amateur community and what they can be used for.
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