This month’s Sky at Night has been shifted all over the place. Sunday’s first episode was late, and the BBC4 extended edition which was supposed to go out yesterday will now go out NEXT Monday, the 9th, at 8.30pm. The repeat on BBC2 will be on Sunday at 12pm (although if the Wimbledon schedule continues to slip who knows).
One more post for today – an observing challenge for you all.
Asteroid 57424 (think of the number as a date) has now been named Caelumnoctu in honour of the Sky at Night (we weren’t allowed skyatnight as it isn’t a real word). It’s a main belt asteroid, orbiting the Sun once every 5 years or so, and I would love an image of it. I think it’s near conjunction (behind the Sun) right now, but I’ll find a prize for the first astrophotographer to send me one.
We had a fantastic 50th birthday party for the Sky at Night a couple of days ago, on the actual anniversary of the first transmission. More than 250 guests turned up (Patrick was hosting an overflow party for 200 or so more yesterday!) and we filmed what felt like hundreds of interviews which you’ll get to see in the next program (broadcast May 6th), along with the best of the archive.
My favourite moments are pictured below. The first shows Patrick with his five surviving producers; from left to right Pat Owtram (9 years), Pat Wood (about 4, I think), Pieter Morpurgo (almost 20), Ian Russell (3, and the producer of the first shows I appeared on) and Jane Fletcher (5 and counting). All deserve much more credit than they get, so it was great to see them all.
The MC for the party was the astronaut Piers Sellers. I’d missed the filming for Patrick’s January interview and so it was wonderful to have a chance to talk to him (the photo below was at the end of a very long night…). Hopefully we’ll hear more from him on the programme soon.
It’s nice to see that we’ve been recognised in Parliament, even if there are a couple of small errors. (The 650th programme was in January, and the anniversary programmes will be broadcast usual on the 1st Sunday of the month).
I don’t know if this is general knowledge, but Patrick and I aren’t the people with the last word on the programme. It gets whisked into editing, from whence it emerges usually hugely improved. I was therefore *slightly* nervous about what tonight had in store, but as it turns out I needn’t have worried. Everyone did an excellent job (although I might need to have a word about one or two graphics!) and I feel we did the Sky at Night proud. I hope you did too. If you haven’t seen it, tomorrow night on BBC4 is your next chance.
Enough of the pictures, especially as I can’t always get them to resize. Tomorrow’s program is the end result of more than a year’s hard work by a cast of thousands (well, it’s felt like thousands by normal Sky at Night standards). We did an ‘archive’ programme for BBC4 (hopefully this will be reshown at some point) about a year ago, and wanted to do something different for the 50th anniversary.
Patrick wrote the first script, and for once we completely ignored him as it handed over to me and others about five minutes in. Typically generous, but just not on! Eventually, between us we came up with the idea of looking at astronomy 50 years ago compared to that 50 years in the future. At which point we got a little ambitious.
Those of you who are regular viewers will suspect that we’re rather proud of the low-budget Sky at Night effects. Our masterstroke, I think, was explaining the period of transits of Venus using a couple of hoops and a lemon (don’t mock, it got us our only newspaper review to date as the Independent said it made more sense than any amount of computer graphics). For this, though, we’ve been a little more ambitious and the second half of the program will be presented by a computerized Patrick. For anyone roughly the same age as me, the effect is rather similar to Gamesmaster. The script was worked out by talking to the interviewees – Brian May (on Mars), John Zarnecki (on the ISS) and Bob Nichol (on the Moon). The only constraint was that we’ve been deliberately optimistic – this side of a few pints I don’t really think we’ll be on Mars in 2057, but it is possible.
This left 1957 to deal with. My original idea was to use the (few) surviving archive clips and reconstruct an interview between 2007 Patrick and his older self. The only problem was that the clips are a fairly random selection and it was difficult to get anything coherent together. At which point, Jane Fletcher, our long-suffering producer, had an incredible, mind-blowing idea, and we recruited this man. Jon Culshaw, impressionist and amateur astronomer. Suddenly (budget out of the window) we were reconstructing the 1950s set in the studio, recruiting owners of vintage cameras and bringing the two Patricks face to face.
It sounds like a gimmick, but take my word for it (for the next 36 hours at least) it’s wonderful. It’s stunning to be reminded how little we knew a relatively short time ago, and hopefully that will come across along with the fun. It’s what the Sky at Night has always done – enjoyed ourselves while being deadly serious – and it’s a powerful combination. Here’s to the next 50, hope you enjoy the program. 11.30pm Sunday night, 8.30pm Monday night BBC4, Saturday 7th 12.45pm on BBC2.
P.S. I want to say thanks to everyone involved for an amazing ride, but particularly to Patrick and Jane (mentioned above), the indefatigable Dirk Maggs (the man who introduced Brian and Patrick) for his help with the script and our researcher Phil Rosenberg.
This Sunday’s Sky at Night, at the (for us) earlier time of 11.30, will be worth watching. It’ll be a full half hour long, and will be the first half of the 50th anniversary celebrations. More details later in the week.
Update : See the photo below for now…
We were running around at the weekend, recording the last of the interviews for the 50th anniversary programme and enjoying the lunar eclipse. Spectacular, wasn’t it?
Anyway, with only one more bout of filming to go and the rushes looking fantastic, time for another photo.
I think out of everything we do, I most enjoy talking about Mars and Saturn. The missions to both have brought back amazing pictures over the last few years, and it’s great that for the last program of the first 50 years of the Sky at Night, we’re going to back to Saturn. The latest results from Cassini are incredible and in John Zarnecki and Michele Dougherty we have two of our best interviewees.
It’s on Sunday night, on BBC2 at 23.45, followed by the extended edition on BBC 4 on Monday evening at 7pm (repeated at 00:50 in the early hours of Tuesday).
Off filming again for the 50th anniversary programme today. In the meantime, here’s a very interesting photograph for you – more to follow.
