Space Junk

In this episode, Dustin and Tony continue their discussion of astro-imaging cameras, specifically, which ones are best for different types of imaging.  Whether you want to take wide-field space scapes, high magnification planetary images, or deep sky objects, we'll cover all of that and more.

Today's astronomy camera selection is amazing, comprehensive and overwhelming!  The imaging capabilities manufacturers make available at amateurs has never been more sophisticated. Nowadays, you can do virtually any night sky imaging you can imagine with off-the-shelf equipment.  This selection is a double-edged sword though, because while you can do anything and everything these days, knowing where to start can be challenging - and expensive.

Thanks to advances in sensors, software and the implementation of the smartphone, amateur astronomy as a hobby is under going a renaissance.  Complete beginners can now enter the hobby and capture amazing views of the night sky faster and share them with the world easier.  This new class of telescopes also helps the visual observer overcome the inexorable loss of our dark skies due to light pollution.  In this episode, Dustin and Tony discuss their experiences using both telescopes and Dustin also provides some background on the Celestron Starsense accessory for the NexStar line of telescopes.

We are lucky enough to live in a time when amateur astronomers using off-the-shelf equipment can make meaningful contributions to professional astronomy.  Advances in equipment, detectors and software allow anyone with the interest, to track asteroids, comets and even measure exoplanet light curves.  In this episode, we talk with this new breed of amateur who, from his garage observatory, is helping NASA track asteroids.

How old were you when you first got interested in space and astronomy?  What did you do to pursue that interest?  In this episode we meet Abigail Bollenbach, a young student just starting out in our hobby who has jumped in with both feet.  When she's not giving presentations at her local astronomy club in Oklahoma or creating planetarium shows, she can be found creating astronomy videos with Astronomy Magazine.

In this episode, she tells Tony and Dustin her story of adventure in exploring space and the universe.

Radian Telescopes is a new company founded by OPT that strives to solve problems of amateur astronomy.  Driven to identifying needs and meeting them with high-quality hardware, Radian is a company all amateur astronomers need to know about.  In this episode, Dustin tells the story of how the company started, its values and what's coming in the future.

Does Mars have the most overpriced real estate ever?  While going to Mars would be great from a scientific standpoint, would you really want to live there?  Should we go to Mars?  Fraser Cain joins us for the third in a series of episodes discussing life in the universe.

What is life?  Where should we look for it outside of Earth?  Is life common or rare?  These questions and many more are the daily job of Graham Lau, an astrobiologist who has joined us for this episode of Space Junk!

This week Dustin and Tony go deep and talk about the nature of reality, what knowledge is and how we can colonize the stars.  

Skye Schwartz has a remarkable story to tell, one filled with obstacles overcome and dreams coming into focus.  Skye shares these stories with Tony and Dustin in this episode and we hope you'll find her as amazing as we did.