The 365 Days of Astronomy

Hosted by Chris Beckett & Shane Ludtke, two amateur astronomers in Saskatchewan who enjoy teaching astronomy classes and showing the public views through their telescopes. actualastronomy@gmail.com This month in episode 528 we talk about 3 Comets, two of which may end up being very bright. We also touch on some colorful double and carbon stars. There are many spring spirals we help listeners find as well as the Lyrid Meteor shower. This month the Moon pairs with Spica, Antares and the planets and at mid-Month a very young moon is visible for some listeners. Gamma Leonis - Colorful double star 02 - Full Moon - Spica and Moon less than 4° apart 03 - Morning Targets: - Mercury Greatest Elongation 28° from Sun in morning sky - Spring elongations are a disappointment for Mercury - Long Period Variable star max for R Serpentis 05 - Spot Sirius unaided eye before sunset this week. 88 Leonis colorful double star 06 and later - NGC 2903, large 9th mag. spiral in Leo M48 - 6th mag. open cluster well placed at the meridian Moon and Antares at dawn less than 4° apart 08 - NGC 3521 - well placed 9th magnitude spiral galaxy in S. Leo 09 - Carbon Star TU Geminorum is best 10 & later - Last Quarter Moon and Lunar X visible and 10th magnitude comet hanging out in Ursa Major Mid-April - Moon, Mercury, Neptune, Mars, Saturn all congregate in morning sky - they are LOW 17 - New AND ***** Very Young Moon visible 14.5hrs old for us here in Canada, 6th magnitude so a real challenge but west of us esp. West coast it'll be 17hrs old… that's very doable 18 - Venus and Moon under 5° apart 22 - Lyrid Meteors - ZHR 18 - best in pre-dawn skies 23 - Last quarter Moon & Hipparchus ray visible on Moon 24 - Mons Pico & Pico Beta (the "Brothers Pico") visible south of Plato Long period variable carbon star SS Vir @ 11:00 pm 25 - Moon occults Regulus this evening, 6:45pm for extreme S Canada & USA 25 - Eastern Mare 9:00 pm & Eyes of Clavius 9:00 pm 26 - Lunar Straight wall Please subscribe and share the show with other stargazers you know and send us show ideas, observations and questions to actualastronomy@gmail.com We've added a new way to donate to 365 Days of Astronomy to support editing, hosting, and production costs. Just visit: https://www.patreon.com/365DaysOfAstronomy and donate as much as you can! Share the podcast with your friends and send the Patreon link to them too! Every bit helps! Thank you! ------------------------------------ Do go visit http://www.redbubble.com/people/CosmoQuestX/shop for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness! http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations. Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!) ------------------------------------ The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute. http://www.psi.edu Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCqU0nz6iFU Hosted by Fraser Cain. From May 21, 2019. On Monday, May 13, 2019, NASA declared: "We are going to the Moon to stay" by 2024. It's an exciting announcement; the return to a place humans haven't set foot on in more than 45 years. A serious goal that will test the ability of technology and engineering, as well as the bravery of the men and women who will carry out this task. But we've also heard announcements like this before, many times. How will the mission come together? What are the risks? What's new this time? We've added a new way to donate to 365 Days of Astronomy to support editing, hosting, and production costs. Just visit: https://www.patreon.com/365DaysOfAstronomy and donate as much as you can! Share the podcast with your friends and send the Patreon link to them too! Every bit helps! Thank you! ------------------------------------ Do go visit http://www.redbubble.com/people/CosmoQuestX/shop for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness! http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations. Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!) ------------------------------------ The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute. http://www.psi.edu Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org.

Today's guest: Dr. Richard Tresch Fienberg, astronomer and science communicator, recently served as the Expert Astronomer for Sky & Telescope's September 2025 Astronomy Tour. In our interview, we explore "Galileo's Italy" with him. Though enjoying retirement, he volunteers his time for the American Astronomical Society as Senior Advisor to the CEO, and is a Senior Contributing Editor with Sky & Telescope. This is the second of two episodes covering our interview. H'ad astra historia is the official podcast for the Historical Astronomy Division (https://had.aas.org/) of the American Astronomical Society. We're here to share stories from and about the people who study the stars, planets, and the cosmos. We'll be hearing from individuals who not only study the history of astronomy, but also those who lived it, who were "in the room" during pivotal events within the last 50 years or so. Podcast theme music: - "Frost Waltz" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under creative commons: by attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) - Star Trek sound effects: the Trek Core website (https://www.trekcore.com/audio/) - Music for interview question 3 (highlights of Rome): Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (1607), an excerpt from Carnegie Hall+ from June 2022 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doMbxshdTPc) Podcaster: Loretta Cannon (an AAS affiliate via Rose City Astronomers) is a science-and-word-nerd who really likes outer space and the people who study it. She quite enjoys working as HAD's podcaster, sharing astronomy stories to you. We've added a new way to donate to 365 Days of Astronomy to support editing, hosting, and production costs. Just visit: https://www.patreon.com/365DaysOfAstronomy and donate as much as you can! Share the podcast with your friends and send the Patreon link to them too! Every bit helps! Thank you! ------------------------------------ Do go visit http://www.redbubble.com/people/CosmoQuestX/shop for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness! http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations. Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!) ------------------------------------ The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute. http://www.psi.edu Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJNpipCncKA Hosted by: Fraser Cain ( @frasercain ) and Dr. Pamela L. Gay ( @CosmoQuest ) Streamed live on Mar 23, 2026. The theory of evolution how life takes on its wildly different forms. But how did life get started in the first place? It appears the Universe has been making life's molecules in space for billions of years, setting up the conditions for life… everywhere? One of humanity's fundamental questions is "where does life come from." We can't answer that question, but we can tell you where some of the stuff of life came from. This show is supported through people like you on Patreon.com/AstronomyCast In this episode, we'd like to thank: Burry Gowen, Eric Lee, Jeanette Wink, Michael Purcell, Andrew Poelstra, David, David Rossetter, Ed, Gerhard Schwarzer, Jason Kwong, Joe McTee, Sergey Manouilov, Siggi Kemmler, Sergio Sancevero We've added a new way to donate to 365 Days of Astronomy to support editing, hosting, and production costs. Just visit: https://www.patreon.com/365DaysOfAstronomy and donate as much as you can! Share the podcast with your friends and send the Patreon link to them too! Every bit helps! Thank you! ------------------------------------ Do go visit http://www.redbubble.com/people/CosmoQuestX/shop for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness! http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations. Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!) ------------------------------------ The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute. http://www.psi.edu Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org.

Dr. Al Grauer hosts. Dr. Albert D. Grauer ( @Nmcanopus ) is an observational asteroid hunting astronomer. Dr. Grauer retired from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 2006. travelersinthenight.org From September 2025. Today's 2 topics: - Dr. Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office reports that on June 26, 2025 shortly after noon a beachball sized meteoroid traveling at approximately 30,000 miles per hour broke up about 27 miles above the town of West Forrest, Georgia. - Astronomers have discovered some 1.4 million asteroids. Approximately 35,000 of these space rocks come near Earth. Less than 40 of them are classified as being Atira asteroids whose orbits lie entirely within the Earth's orbit about the Sun. Only one of these, asteroid number 594913 named 'Ayló'chaxnim (eye-LAW-chax-nim) has an orbit which is entirely within the orbit of the planet Venus. [Editor's note: ꞌAylóꞌchaxnim means 'Venus girl' in the indigenous Luiseño language[18] of southern California. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/594913_ꞌAylóꞌchaxnim] We've added a new way to donate to 365 Days of Astronomy to support editing, hosting, and production costs. Just visit: https://www.patreon.com/365DaysOfAstronomy and donate as much as you can! Share the podcast with your friends and send the Patreon link to them too! Every bit helps! Thank you! ------------------------------------ Do go visit http://www.redbubble.com/people/CosmoQuestX/shop for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness! http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations. Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!) ------------------------------------ The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute. http://www.psi.edu Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org.

From March 18, 2026. This episode went through a lot of rewrites as breaking news kept breaking our hearts. Artemis is still on, but there are delays and cancellations. Before we face that, let's look at some pretty pictures and remember the universe is pretty even when our Earthly-timeline is not. JWST Wolf-Rayet stars pix: https://science.nasa.gov/asset/webb/wolf-rayet-apep-miri-image/ Exposed Cranium Nebula: https://science.nasa.gov/asset/webb/exposed-cranium-nebula-nircam-and-miri-images/ We've added a new way to donate to 365 Days of Astronomy to support editing, hosting, and production costs. Just visit: https://www.patreon.com/365DaysOfAstronomy and donate as much as you can! Share the podcast with your friends and send the Patreon link to them too! Every bit helps! Thank you! ------------------------------------ Do go visit http://www.redbubble.com/people/CosmoQuestX/shop for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness! http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations. Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!) ------------------------------------ The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute. http://www.psi.edu Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org.

Don Pettit, veteran NASA astronaut with 590+ days in space and inventor of the Zero-G Cup, shares vivid stories from long-duration missions. He talks neutral-buoyancy training, suit comfort and reentry extremes. Hear about fluid and particle experiments, novel photography techniques from orbit, and preparations and challenges for Artemis II.

Hosted by Steve Nerlich. Bringing it home. Cheap Astronomy digs in to asteroid mining. Dear Cheap Astronomy – Are rubble pile asteroids easier to mine? Rubble pile asteroids are a collection of rocks that have accreted together under their mutual gravity, but the object they form isn't massive enough for gravity to compress it into one unified object. Instead, the rocks that gather together remain as individual rocks. So, from a mining perspective there's an advantage in that you can just pick up those individual rocks without needing drilling or explosives. Dear Cheap Astronomy – How do we get mining products back to Earth? The current narrative on space mining seems to go in two directions. One direction is about in situ resource utilization (ISRU in NASA speak) where there's no doubt it's a lot cheaper to source water from space than to launch it from Earth – and a similar principle applies to most building materials: steel, concrete and glass. Of course, the mathematics of in situ resource utilization makes perfect sense but begs the question of what the economic incentives are to build dwellings in space and source space water to support the people in those dwellings, as well supporting agriculture and making rocket fuel. If we can't identify those incentives, we're just saying that we're going to go into space so we can go into space. We've added a new way to donate to 365 Days of Astronomy to support editing, hosting, and production costs. Just visit: https://www.patreon.com/365DaysOfAstronomy and donate as much as you can! Share the podcast with your friends and send the Patreon link to them too! Every bit helps! Thank you! ------------------------------------ Do go visit http://www.redbubble.com/people/CosmoQuestX/shop for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness! http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations. Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!) ------------------------------------ The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute. http://www.psi.edu Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org.

Paul Hill & Dr. Jenifer "Dr. Dust" Millard host. Damien Phillips, John Wildridge and Dustin Ruoff produce. Our chatty astrowaffle episode this month (March Part 2) is all about the Artemis re-jig and what the future now holds for the program. Oh, and an update on Jeni's drains. Cafuego's Jellyfish: https://app.astrobin.com/u/cafuego?i=zdl9yu We've added a new way to donate to 365 Days of Astronomy to support editing, hosting, and production costs. Just visit: https://www.patreon.com/365DaysOfAstronomy and donate as much as you can! Share the podcast with your friends and send the Patreon link to them too! Every bit helps! Thank you! ------------------------------------ Do go visit http://www.redbubble.com/people/CosmoQuestX/shop for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness! http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations. Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!) ------------------------------------ The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute. http://www.psi.edu Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org