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Astronomycast, episode 256 from Monday, March 12, 2012. Resolution.

Welcome to Astronomycast, 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 the universe today, and with me is Dr. Pamela Gaye, a professor at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville.

Hi Pamela, how are you doing?

I'm doing well, how are you doing Fraser?

I'm doing really well, spring is coming, everything's getting a lot better now.

And neither of us experienced horrible storms this week, and our thoughts are with all of you that had tornadoes, but no, we're all safe here.

Yeah, we don't get any tornadoes on the west coast of Canada, everything else.

And they went north and south of me, so.

Did they actually come close to you?

Yeah.

Oh wow.

Yeah, I mean I saw some crazy surveillance footage and things like that, and it's just terrible.

So I just have a few things to let people know this week.

One thing is we've moved the virtual star parties to Sunday nights at 7 p.m., Pacific Standard Time.

So this is where we go and connect up as many telescopes as we can into a live Google Plus Hangout, and then people can see what it looks like to actually look through these telescopes.

And it's really great.

I got to say we've had some amazing views of all the planets at various points.

We've had beautiful deep sky objects, just like last night when we're recording, we viewed M51, which is the world pool galaxy.

So if you have any interest in seeing what it looks like to look through a telescope and see different varieties, I highly recommend you check that out.

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