AWESOME ASTRONOMY

The Discussion: This month we take a look at the recent supermoon and what it takes to make the moon 'super'; Jeni goes teaching kids about space and hones her exoplanet hunting skills; while Paul's been hosting events with British astronaut Tim Peake.

The News: Rounding up the space and astronomy news this month we have:

• An update on Blue Origin's spaceflight ambitions
• More on Shiaparelli and Exomars part 1
• A NASA Director's worries about science in a Trump administration
• An Ocean like the Dead Sea under Pluto's ice sheets
• The roundest object in space
• Could dark energy actually be an emergent property of entropy?
• The dinosaur-killing asteroid may have turned planet Earth inside out

The Hat of Woo: Delving into the rank and putrid world of conspiracy theories to debunk the nonsense that lies within. This month Paul pulls Project Pegasus out of his fetid hat where a young President Obama was part of a team of juveniles used in the 1980s to teleport to Mars and into the past. No, really!

Q&A: Listeners' questions via email, Facebook & Twitter take us on a journey into the astronomy issues that have always plagued our understanding or stretched our credulity. This month we go back to Tycho Brahe:

What is a plain regular (non-super) nova? Doug, @DesRon94, Detroit Michigan

What to look out, and up, for in December.

Our highlights of this month's skies with the planet on offer to observers and imagers:

• Venus shining brilliantly in the evening sky
• Mercury at greatest elongation on 11th December
• Jupiter returns to our late night skies

Next up is the meteor showers and December brings us the greatest of them all:

• The Geminids peaking on the night of 13/14th December

Then we each take a deep sky pick from our list of favourites for this time of year:

• Jeni – IC 1396 - The Elephant Trunk Nebula in Cepheus
• Paul – M78 – a reflection nebula in Orion
• Ralph – NGC 246 the Skull Nebula in Cetus

And we finish this sky guide with December's moon phases.

Perhaps the most frequently asked question to the show (and apologies to Terry Dunlin who asked this question about 2 years ago!) is what you need to consider when buying a telescope or what makes the right telescope for you.

So, in this podcast extra, we pool our collective brainpower to bring you a 20 minute discussion of telescope types, apertures, portability and capabilities to help you get the perfect telescope for you.

If you're thinking of buying your first telescope – or thinking of getting one as a gift for someone this Christmas – then this will give you all the considerations for that purchase.

We recommend The Tring Astronomy Centre (www.tringastro.co.uk), but the most important thing is to buy from a dedicated astronomy retailer rather than the internet or ordinary high street stores. A dedicated astronomy retailer will be able to advise you from a position of knowledge and provide the aftercare you need.

The Discussion: In a month when the European Space Agency succeeded and failed in the first part of their Exomars saga, we go through the glory and the debris of Mars exploration, hanging out with astronauts Tim Peake and Tim Kopra, conducting exoplanet research, provide some advice about studying astrophysics and explain why the effects of dark matter aren't witnessed in our own solar system.

The News: Rounding up the space and astronomy news this month we have:

• Exomars, round one
• Another look at the Viking mission data that may have discovered Martian life
• Hubble discovers that the universe contains 10 times more galaxies than thought
• A philosophical discussion about the chances of life existing elsewhere
• Venus was habitable when life began to flourish on Earth
• Elon Musk's plans for colonising the solar system
• The ethics of colonising other planets
• An update of NASA's Juno mission at Jupiter
• And the latest taikonauts and astronauts.

The Hat of Woo: Paul's Hat of Woo is the repository for all festering and rancid conspiracy theories that have no basis in truth and yet persist in any dark and stinking corner of the internet.

This month we pull one of the biggies out of the putrid hat: Evil aliens and a reptilian rival for the title of overlord.

The Interview: This month we return to writer, broadcaster and researcher Dr Chris North from Cardiff University to answer a listener's question on Chris' interview in last month's episode.

Dr North mentioned that we can see Gravitational Waves to discover all sorts of information from these waves, such as size, distance & velocity, which I can understand (through Amplitude and frequency and rate of change of the signal), but how is it also possible to infer things like the spin and spin rate from the wave signal? (ignoring the question of how does a black hole spin if it has mass but no matter as Dr North mentions, and how do events happen inside a black hole since as you get closer to the event horizon doesn't time appear to us to slow down to us as an outside observer?) Mark de Vrij in Poland.

What to look out, and up, for in November.

Our highlights of this month's skies with the planet on offers to observers and imagers:

• A last chance to enjoy views of Mars for 2016
• The return of the King of Planets: Jupiter
• A Saturn and Venus conjunction

And we each take a deep sky pick from our list of favourites for this time of year:

• Ralph – Colourful binary star Almaak in Andromeda
• Jeni – The magnificent constellation of Orion and the Orion Nebula
• Paul – NGC 404, Mirach's Ghost in Andromeda

And we finish this sky guide with November's moon phases.

This podcast extra features the talk given by Nick Howes at Spring 2015's AstroCamp about life and death in space.

Nick takes us on a fascinating tour of our universe and explains:

• Dangerous phenomena in the galaxy
• Martian meteorites
• The places in the solar system where life may exist
• Exploring comets
• The marvel of the Rosetta spacecraft
• How comets are discovered and named
• The Oort Cloud - home to a trillion comets
• The potential for asteroid impacts
• Comet Shoemaker Levy striking Jupiter
• How can we prevent asteroid strikes?
• Look for new objects in your sky images and online Why we should be concerned about Earth impactors and what we, the public, can do to mitigate this inevitable disaster scenario.

The Discussion: If you enjoy our attention to scripting, our professional quality audio and our stringent editing, then you're bang out of luck! This show comes from our AstroCamp stargazing event in Wales and we're making it up as we go along.

This month we take you through the delights of dark sky stargazing among friends, Jeni becomes a paid scientist and we get the reactions of the gang as we reveal signed movie poster mock ups that we're emailing to listeners.

The News: Rounding up the space and astronomy news this month we have:

• Gravity Spy – hunt for gravitational waves in this new citizen science project
• More details on NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission
• The first data from ESA's Gaia spacecraft wows us all

The Interview: This month we welcome back writer, broadcaster and researcher Dr Chris North from Cardiff University to discuss Gravitational Waves: what this means for the future of professional astronomy and what we can expect from this new field of astronomy in the future.

Q&A: Listeners' questions via email, Facebook & Twitter take us on a journey into the astronomy issues that have always plagued our understanding or stretched our credulity. This month we're tackling a question about exoplanet detections with a back of the envelope calculation – and Jeni's making Ralph do the maths. It's fair to say, he's not happy about it:

A big hello from your Antipodean fan from Melbourne to all Martian superior beings in the UK (or something like that)… Whilst listening to your eagerly awaited last instalment of the show I was intrigued by Jeni's (who I believe has been to Australia…) exoplanet research. I am familiar with the concept of observing transits and teasing the dip of brightness out of the data flood. So far so good. That means that we, Earth and Mars of course have to be in the same plane in order to be able to get an observable transit. Is there any data or knowledge if there is a general orientation of planetary systems in relation to us or the galactic plane? Meaning if we know that can we extrapolate somehow how many planets are really out there as we obviously can only observe a fraction of the existing systems? Bit hard to explain but with your superior minds I am sure you will get the idea… :)? Clem Unger, Melbourne, Australia.

What to look out, and up, for in October.

Our highlights of this month's skies with the planet on offer to observers and imagers:

• Venus & Saturn in the late evening with a nice conjunction of the pair.
• Uranus as it reaches opposition on the 16th.

Next up is the meteor showers and October brings us:

• The Draconids peaking on 7th October
• The Orionids peaking on 20th/21st October

Then we each take a deep sky pick from our list of favourites for this time of year:

• Ralph – Algol, the Demon Star & The Double Cluster in Perseus
• Paul – The Auriga open clusters: M36, M37 & M38
• Jeni – and the Owl Cluster in Cassiopeia

And we finish this sky guide with October's moon phases.

In this month's AstroCamp podcast extra episode:

The Discussion: An introduction to star parties and enjoying practical astronomy under pristine dark skies away from the city. As the podcast crew run the AstroCamp star party, which many listeners attend, in the Brecon Beacon's international dark sky reserve twice a year, we take you through the events, tutorials and workshops we run to help you hone your stargazing skills and win astronomy prizes from the Tring Astronomy Centre.

The Sky guides: In readiness for 3 nights of stargazing in the Welsh valleys, Ralph, Paul and Damien choose objects to look out for this time of year. If you're not coming to AstroCamp, these are still great night sky treats to try and locate wherever you are in the northern hemisphere.

Ralph's top choices take in the Owl Cluster, The Double Cluster and the vast North America Nebula.

Damien takes a look at the solar system objects available a little closer to home this month as he runs through the asteroids, dwarf planets and meteor showers on offer to AstroCampers

And Paul finishes out autumnal round up with Herschel's Garnet Star, the original Cepheid Variable and the magnificent galaxy cluster Stephan's Quintet.

The Discussion: Jeni's astronomy research yields its first results in the hunt for exoplanet phase variation and we revisit our Star Wars podcast extras with a listener's book review.

The News: Rounding up the space and astronomy news this month we have:

• An 'Earthlike planet detected by ESO around our nearest stellar neighbour
• The upcoming launch of OSIRIS Rex to sample an asteroid
• That bump in the data at CERN turns out to be a false hope
• That alien megastructure story just won't foxtrot oscar
• The Cassini spacecraft spots methane filled canyons on Saturn's moon Titan
• A meteorite lands in Yorkshire garden. Real or fake?

Woobusters: Continuing our quest to debunk the myths and conspiracy theories that persist in every dark corner of the news and the internet. This month's topic, picked at random from Paul's festering Hat of Woo: Area 51 – the remote and secret installation in the Nevada desert where sanity gets dissected and reason is left to die.

Q&A: Listeners' questions via email, Facebook & Twitter take us on a journey into the astronomy issues that have always plagued our understanding or stretched our credulity. This month we get a question that probes certainty in science and how high certainty discoveries can still turn out to be wrong:

Why when the Bicep two team found the evidence for primordial gravitational waves did they claim it was a five sigma result, and later wasn't it shown the result was not accurate? I thought a five sigma had a 1 in 350million chance of being wrong! There has to be something I don't understand about the sigma scale or the Bicep results? Rodney Cuthbertson.