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

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 :

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.

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.

“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.).

Cheers, Chris

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

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.