Chris Lintott’s Universe

For those of you who don’t live in the UK, there’ll be a chance to watch six of the best Sky at Night episodes from the last few years on the BBC World News channel.

The first - my interview with the last man to walk on the Moon, Eugene Cernan will be broadcast today at 1530 GMT (that’s 1030 am EST), and then repeated at 0230 GMT on Friday (21.30 EST, Thursday).

Enjoy - and let me know if you see them.

Chris

Our recent Sky at Night programme about the Northern Lights seems to have attracted a lot of attention. To be honest, I don’t think we can take too much of the credit for this as we could have just shown the Lights and people would still have watched open mouthed.

To get a taste of it, the BBC have put a clip from the broadcast up on Youtube, so sit back, pour yourself a glass of aquavit and enjoy :

I’m up in Tromso, northern Norway, filming the Northern Lights with the Sky at Night team. We need to dash out to make the most of the fleeting hours of twilight here in the Arctic circle, so I’ll write more later, but for now enjoy this picture from last night’s display. It was taken by Pete Lawrence or me (we were sharing a camera, but Pete did all the hard work) and is featured on Space Weather today.

Aurora from Tromso

The picture shows space shuttles Atlantis and Endeavour sitting on launch pads in Florida, waiting for Atlantis’ mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. We were going to be there for the Sky at Night, but as you’ll have heard, a major failure with Hubble’s control system means that the flight is to be delayed until next year. We filmed an excellent preview of the mission with Martin Barstow last weekend, so I’m chalking this one up to the Sky at Night curse.

Trying to be positive, it’s obvious that we would have been in serious trouble had the faliure happened after this, the final repair mission. Right now, though, I feel like a sulky child who has had his toys taken away from him.

Meanwhile, we’re scrambling to make the best use of our tickets to the US, and to fill the large hole in forthcoming programmes that this will leave. An unexpected bright comet, or a supernova, would go down very well round about now, please.

Have I mentioned how much I liked this month’s Sky at Night episode (even if I look like I could do with a week or so of sleep)? Yes? Well, let me point out anyway that it’s now up on our watch again page so those of you beyond these shores can listen to our discussion of cosmology and what we don’t know about the Universe.

I’m rather proud of May’s Sky at Night; with a more informal format than usual, we used the excuse of it being program number 666 to look at the devils haunting modern cosmology, the things that we don’t yet know. Our guests, Gerry Gilmore from Cambridge and Kate Land from Oxford did a fantastic job, Patrick stirred things up as usual and I hope it will give a different perspective on what exactly the state of play is.

If you’re in the UK you can watch it on the BBC’s iplayer, otherwise I’ll post a link when it’s on our website. Or, of course, you could just watch BBC2 on Saturday at the later than usual time of 2.40 pm.

I’ve just returned from Texas to find that the world may be ending. Patrick’s beloved Woodstock typewriter, owned since he was nine and used for every one of his books, is finally giving up the ghost. With only his two middle fingers, he could type accurately on it at 90 words a minute and it was a terrifying sight. Patrick describes its finest moment:

“NASA were producing a book about the Moon. I was asked to write the chapter on lunar transient phenomena, which I did. I then had a letter back from the NASA editor. ‘Dear Patrick. Thank you for your chapter: it is exactly right. Right length, right attitude, right references. I am delighted with it, and it will go straight to press. Also congratulations - you are the first author to send in his chapter.’ Underneath, in pencil : ‘What the bloody hell did you type it on?’ Sadly, it now needs the services of an expert mechanic. Unfortunately they all seem busy with trifling things such as sending rockets to the Moon. I have had to put everything on hold. Help!”

If you can help Patrick’s poor typewriter, please get in touch. (But you might want to beware a mob of angry publishers - they’ve been waiting for Patrick to convert to a word processor for decades.).

I feel like I’ve been plugging Sky at Night for weeks, but the Last Man on the Moon programme is now available online here. I’m seriously extremely proud of this interview, and insist you all watch it.

Cheers, Chris

More interesting writing soon, but I wanted to remind you about tonight’s BBC 4 EXTENDED Sky at Night interview with Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan. The BBC 2 repeat is next Saturday at midday.

Sky at Night team and important person in Apollo Mission Control. From left to right Rob (camera), Me (Waffle), Jane (Producer, Director and coffee maker), Captain Cernan (LMotM*) and Martin (sound). The certificates in the background are proclamations ‘retiring’ colours of flight controllers. Gene Kranz, for example, the controller who led the rescue of Apollo 13, was white flight and since his retirement no-one has used that call sign. After more than 40 years, though, they’re running out of colours. Sadly, rather than chose wonders as ‘beige flight’ (or ‘puce flight’) they’ve moved on to metals instead.

NASA’s worst nightmare; having me in the flight director’s seat is an obvious mistake. Can you spot the other glaring error in the picture?.

* LMotM = Last Man on the Moon

I went up to Birmingham to record the voiceover for the interview with Eugene Cernan, which included a sneak preview of the programme. I’m really pleased with it; the team have done a great job of cutting down nearly two hours of interview while keeping the best bits. There are a few surprising comments, and a couple of stories that send a shiver down your spine. As the modest man I am, I don’t always plug the programme on the blog, but this one really is required watching, if only for some of the shots that the team have pulled out of the archives.

BBC One : Sunday night (early Monday morning) 00:45
BBC Four EXTENDED EDITION (Watch this one if you can) : Monday evening 19:30

But what if you can’t wait until Sunday or Monday for your Sky at Night? If you have access to BBC4 you don’t have to! Tonight there’s a repeat of our meteor special (the filming for which was one of the more surreal nights of my life). That’s on at 19.30. Then this Sunday is satellite night on BBC4, and our contribution looks at the British contribution to the space age. That’s 20.30 on BBC 4.

Enjoy. (And if you’re not in the UK, remember all of these will end up on the magazine cover disc, and the Cernan interview will land on the website before too long.