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 258 from Monday, March 26, 2012. Biking Landers.

Welcome to Astronomycast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos. We help you understand not 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.

Pamela, how are you doing?

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

Good, so I apologize to everyone for the big delay between this episode and the previous episodes, but we are back dating because I was away in a European trip with my family.

So I hope to record a bunch of episodes in advance and ran out of time, and so that has to wait.

But we're going to catch up really quickly and get back into a regular schedule as soon as possible.

So look forward to more Astronomycast goodness shortly. Any other news on your path?

You've got a million crater challenge going on, right?

We have a million crater challenge going on.

Fraser and I, as you may have heard, are part of a new project called CosmoQuest at CosmoQuest.org, and this is a research facility for the public.

And one of the science projects that we're encouraging you to help us with is an exploration in the moon where we're trying to figure out what is the most effective way to map the moon,

by hitting your skills against those of computer algorithms.

And we're challenging you during the waxing period of the moon for this global astronomy month in April to mark 1 million craters.

So we launched it on Saturday. We're up over 50,000 craters already, but we've got a long way to go by that May 5th full moon.

So join in. Register for the site. If you don't register, your craters don't count.

And there, there's prizes for people who hit the 100,000, 200,000, 300 and so on. Mark and then 10 random people will also get prizes and prizes range from surly amy pendants to posters to lunar lithographs.

So get involved, help us accomplish science and maybe get a warm fuzzy. When my researchers do good good work for me, I feed them donuts.

Shipping donuts doesn't work so well. We'll ship you lithographs instead.

...