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Astronomy Cast Episode 306 from Monday, May 13, 2013, a Cretian Discs.

Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts based journey through the cosmos where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know.

My name is Fraser Cain, I'm the publisher of University Day and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, and the director of CosmoQuest. Hey Pamela, how are you doing?

I'm doing well. How are you doing, Fraser?

Doing great, weather's improving. I went out last night with my, I got a new lens for my camera.

I got a 14 millimeter 2.8 lens and captured some wide field astrophotography and it's awesome.

Is it a lens with a rectangular field of view still?

It's a little fisheye. It's a little bit fisheye, is that what you mean?

No, so like with my fisheye lens, it's actually a round part of the detector that it uses, does yours fill the detector?

I think it's cropping a little bit.

Okay, that's cool.

Yeah, but yeah, no, I mean, it's so fast. I mean, I kept turning it down and just kept getting this beautiful shot of the big dipper.

So I haven't really explored it. And tonight there's going to be this potential for a chance, a meteor shower.

So I'm going to try and go out tonight and see if I can get some meters on camera.

That's awesome.

Yeah, now it's probably too late for us. The time people hear this is probably already, we've already done the 24 hour hang out a thong for CosmoQuest.

But if we haven't, June 15th, 16th, 24 hours of fundraising space madness on Google.

And it's never too late to donate. We actually really need your donations to keep our programs going.

We're facing a lot of funding cuts and we've seen a radical drop in donations for Astrosphere, New Media this year.

So if you go to CosmoQuest.org slash donate, you can see the links to donate both for citizen science and to keep media like astronomy cast going into the future.

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