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Astronomy Cast Episode 398.

Seeing things.

Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts based journey through the cosmos. We're helping you understand only what we know, but how we know what we know.

My name is Fraser Kane. I'm the publisher of University Day with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University Ebertsville, and the director of Cosmic West.

Hey Pamela, how you doing? Happy New Year!

Happy New Year's! Do you? It's 2016 and this means that we've been doing this show forever.

For 10 years basically. So we started September of06. It's now 16. Kind of cool.

There you go. We were podcasting before it was cool. It's true. We were podcasting before it was even acceptable. Hey, no.

We were podcasting while it was still embarrassing. Yes, that's true. That is entirely true.

Cool. So we got lots of good shows planned for 2016 all the way through till our summer break. So hang on, it's going to be a fun ride.

Yes.

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Astronomers gather electromagnetic radiation with their telescopes, mostly visible light, but sometimes they got to be clever about where they look for these elusive photons.

Like you can get admitted, absorbed, reflected in each method tells astronomers a little more about what they're looking at.

Okay Pamela, so you put this on the docket. We're going to be talking about different ways that we see the light and the different journeys that this light takes to make it to our telescopes and eyeballs.

Yes. So where do you want to start?

Well, first of all, I want to describe why I came up with this crazy topic because this was one of those things that has never appeared on any list we've ever had or been requested by any listener.

...