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Astronomy Cast Episode 269 from Monday, June 11, 2012.

Welcome to Astronomy Cast, 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 at Rosville. I Pamela, how are you doing?

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

Doing great. So once again, want to remind people that we are recording this

episode of Astronomy Cast as a live Google plus hang out on air.

So if you want to watch us live, you just have to come to either the Astronomy Cast page

or Pamela's page or my page on Mondays at noon Pacific, three Eastern, two central,

nine in London time, and you can watch us record live, ask us questions,

and just sort of watch us goof up recording the episodes.

But the other thing we want to announce this week that's really cool is that we now have a new,

the Cosmic Cast Academy, where we're going to be teaching you astronomy directly.

So can you explain this Pamela?

So the first-card course that we're offering, we're going to have dear astronomer,

Ray Sanders, teaching the course on Solar System 101.

It's eight one-hour classes taught across four weeks.

And our goal is to give you that, that Astra 101 section on planets,

teaching you about how the solar system formed, the different types of planets,

...