You call for that here and there's mountain lions where it is warm enough.

And there's nothing to see.

So I'm going to make a window on the world.

It's my space app, I swear.

It doesn't make you sound any cooler.

It's actually better than the sort of view that Galileo would have had to go 400 years ago.

Hello, welcome to the supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me,

science journalist, Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smith.

Yeah, this month we're grabbing our hats and scarfs as we finally head out for some stargazing.

It only took us, what, three years, Izzy of doing the podcast.

Excuse me, there was a pandemic in between and we weren't allowed to see anyone, okay?

Yeah, anyway, this month we're going to be chatting about how do you actually set up your own telescope?

What can we see with space telescopes? And we hear what happened when Izzy headed off to the observatory in Hurstmannso in Sussex to use their 12-ton telescope.

Spoiler. I was very excited.

And freezing, to be honest.

It was so cold.

It was very cold lately.

But we obviously couldn't do a stargazing episode without our stargazer in chief, Dr Robert Massey,

the deputy director of the Royal Astronomical Society.

So, Robert, where do you think are some of the best places in the UK or even around the world for stargazing?

Well, if money is no object and you're getting fantastic Christmas presents,

there are those amazing places around the world. I mean, what I'd really like to go to would be the European Southern Observatory site in Chile. Just take a telescope down there and stand outside the huge domes at the driest, clearest site on Earth. And in the Southern Hemisphere, too, so you get phenomenal view of the Milky Way. Sub-Saharan Africa is really great. I have been down there.

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