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AstroBites: Stargazing Live


BY RUTH ANGUS ⋅ JANUARY 16, 2014 ⋅ 

Whilst the US astronomy scene was all about the AAS, across the Atlantic we British astronomers had a busy week of our own. Over three evenings in January the BBC broadcast the astronomy TV show, Stargazing Live, which is accompanied by the biggest astronomy outreach event in the calendar. A spectacular hit with the British public, has Stargazing Live generated an all time high interest in astronomy?


Stargazing Live, now in its fourth year, continues to be a smash hit, with ratings exceeding three million – that’s a LOT by UK standards. As its name suggests, it is live, and presented by two heavyweights of British sci-com: Professor Brian Cox and comedian Dara O’Brien. Scheduling a live astronomy show in a country that is overcast three out of every four days is brave.

Nonetheless, despite the often cloudy night skies this show is always popular with keen amateur astronomers and mildly interested members of the public alike. Of course it doesn’t really depend on clear skies – most of the content is interviews with astronauts and academics, guides to the winter night sky, etc.

The knock-out feature of this year’s show was the spectacular Aurora Borealis, filmed in Norway.  Never before broadcast on live television, the northern lights provided a stunning show, streaking across the Norwegian sky.

Footage of the Aurora Borealis was broadcast, live, for the first time in history.

 
Stargazing Live is not just pure entertainment: citizen scientists are recruited by the bucket-load during the broadcasts and real science is achieved as a direct result. This year Dr Chris Lintott invited viewers to participate in Space Warps: the Zooniverse project that asks citizen scientists to hunt for lensed galaxies. The Space Warps team hoped for half a million classifications over the 48 hours of Stargazing. That figure was reached before the end of the first episode.

Dr Lintott said, “We’d thought we were being ambitious to ask for 500,000 classifications over 48 hours, but I was absolutely staggered to hit that target before the end of the first episode. Even as I was reporting live on air I didn’t quite believe what I was saying. I think the success of Spacewarps and Stargazing shows what enthusiasm there is for astronomy in the UK – whether that’s looking up at the sky or learning about the latest results”. After 48 hours more than 8 million images had been classified – a job that would have taken the Space Warps team the rest of their academic careers to complete. Turns out you can achieve a lot with fifty-thousand helpers.


Read more at:
http://astrobites.org/2014/01/16/stargazing-live/