Things that go BANG! in the night ... Kechil interviews Masters student Reikantseone Diretse from the University of Cape Town about his remarkable coup co-authoring a paper in the most prestigious journal, Nature. This is about his work examining the data from our local MeerKAT telescope concerning a massive Gamma Ray Burst, which, don't worry, happened 4 billion years ago.

Professor Miller Goss is a giant in the history of radio astronomy and is a former director of the Very Large Array in New Mexico, USA, where Kechil interviewed him about the extraordinary telescopes of the VLA. He now writes books about the history of radio astronomy, which is relatively short as science goes.

Those striking images you see, many from the Hubble Space Telescope, of swirling colours and bright stars, are not simply taken with a camera. There is a highly involved process leading from the initial instrument (which only actually sees in black and white) to our eyes, which are very poor detectors compared to the instruments we have built. Here to talk us through some of the enormous complexity is world expert and astrophysicist Professor Jayanne English from the University of Manitoba. You can hear a longer discussion on http://thecosmicsavannah.com/

The Sky Guide Africa South 2020 is out! Find yours online or at a bookshop. Come along to watch the Transit of Mercury to the Eden Cafe at Bloubergstrand on 11 November from 2:30 onwards until sunset. Lastly - why is Neptune hotter than expected? And don't complain ever again about Cape Town winds. On Neptune they're 2,500 km/h. Hang on to your hat.

Kechil recently visited the Very Large Array - a radio observatory - in New Mexico, USA. Here she talks to David Finlay and Summer Ash about this extraordinary observatory and its links to South Africa.

Satellite images can be used to monitor whales and perhaps even avert mass strandings. Find out how. Also participate in witnessing the Transit of Mercury on 11 November at Eden Cafe in Bloubergstrand from 14:30 to sunset.

Satellites do wonderful things for us, keeping telephony and entertainment going as well as navigation, power station timing, weather reporting - in short we would be hard-pressed to run the modern world without them now. But how many do we really need? Recently SpaceX gained US approval to launch 12,000 into space and have applied to launch a further 30,000 into orbit. Aside from problems associated with space junk, these satellites interfere with astronomy.

Looking up - 18 October 2019

Can you believe it here in Cape Town Apollo 11 - The Ballet. This will be a luscious spectacle with 250 performers and of course 3 fully suited astronauts. The Director of the Cape Ballet Centre, Evelyne Aregger, chats to Kechil about its astronomical inspiration. Tickets are on sale now at Webmaster and Pick n Pay. The dates are 9&10 November with performances at 2 & 6pm and it will be performed at the newly revamped Joseph Stone auditorium.

Flaring black holes - black holes gobbling up stars - all happening silently in space, far far away. Dr Itumeleng Monageng describes his latest research, revealing a greedy black hole with an accretion disc that regularly brightens every 9 hours and we don't know why. But we are thankful that this dramatic stuff is not going on in our neighbourhood.