Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Great news, everyone! The 365 Days of Astronomy citizen podcast will go on for at least another year!

365DoA is an International Year of Astronomy project that lets you, the astronomy enthusiast, create your own astronomy podcast, upload it, and let everyone on this pale blue dot hear it. It was wildly successful, with spots filling up rapidly once it was announce last year. It also won a coveted Parsec podcast award this year, too.

But given this was an IYA 2009 project, I was wondering if it would continue on to 2010 and beyond, and it will! It’ll become a legacy project, and will be handled by Astrosphere New Media Association, a (charitable and tax-deductible!) online astronomy support group made up of dedicated people. I know this for a fact, because I’m a part of it.

Slots for 2010 are going fast, so you better grab a date if you want to participate! And if you want to help, then we could use some sponsors, too:

The podcast team also invites people and organizations to sponsor the podcast by donating $30 to support 1 day of the podcast, with your dedication appearing at the start of the show. For just $360, it is possible to sponsor 1 episode per month. Alternatively, you can also have a dedication message at the end of the show for a week, for a donation at the $100 level. These donations will help pay for editing, and posting of the podcasts.

Each episode gets between 5000 and 10,000 listeners, so it’s not a terrible way to advertise if you’re looking for that. But submitting an entry is free. If you read this blog — and you do, I see you there — then astronomy is something you enjoy. I bet you can think of some topic here that inspires you, that fires you up, that makes you think.

Go ahead! Make my year.

The SETI Institute’s latest episode of the podcast Are We Alone is now up, and I talk with Seth Shostak about the idea that somehow, forces unknown (God? The Universe Itself? The Doctor? Tony Newman and Doug Phillips?) have tried to sabotage the Large Hadron Collider… from the future!

Personally, I’m not buying it, but it’s an interesting idea. The authors of a published study say that we should perform some sort of experiment before turning the LHC on to see if someone from the future is trying to contact us. But I have a better idea: let’s turn the LHC on and see if it works. If it does, then we’re done with this idea. And if it doesn’t, hand me my sonic screwdriver. There’s work to do!

[Edited to add: Well, the folks at CERN have been injecting particles into the LHC stream since Friday. They'll be ramping it up to full speed in the coming weeks, so we'll know soon enough about all this!]