This episode of AstronomyCast is brought to you by Swinburn Astronomy Online, the world's longest running online astronomy degree program.

Visit astronomy.swin.edu.au for more information.

AstronomyCast Episode 329

Telescope Making Part 3

Amateur Space Telescope

Welcome to AstronomyCast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand only what we know, but how we know what we know.

My name is Fraser Kane, I'm the publisher of Universe Today, and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, and director of CosmoQuest.

Hey Pamela, how you doing?

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

Good, and as we sort of mentioned in the pre-show here, it is bloody cold.

Yeah, everywhere across your country and mine.

Yeah, we have winchills of minus 30 Fahrenheit, which is minus 34 Celsius, and the snow in the drifts is approaching knee-deep, and it's pretty much everywhere deep enough it's going to go in the top of your boot.

And we mentioned that on Christmas Day, on New Year's Day, the temperature in Winnipeg was colder than the temperature on Mars.

We got down to minus, on New Year's Day, I got down to minus 51 Celsius, which is, I'm sure, infinity and Fahrenheit.

So I mean, can you, my friend was in this, and she just said it was incomprehensibly cold.

You do not leave the house. She went out one time.

I went to Michigan State University as an undergraduate, the winners of this year's Rose Bowl, I think I'm required to say.

And there was a couple of times it got down to minus 40, it was like pretty much every year in February, but then one year it hit minus 70 winchill, minus 70 Fahrenheit winchill.

And they closed campus, it's like one of the very few times in memory they've closed campus, because your eyeballs start to freeze over at that temperature.

Alright, let's get rolling.

This episode of Astronomy Cast is brought to you by Eighth Light Inc.

Eighth Light is an agile software development company.

...