Hello and welcome to another bonus episode from the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, science journalist Izzy Clark, astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethers and deputy director of the Royal Astronomical Society, Dr Robert Massey.

Thank you so much to everyone who has sent lovely messages that they're enjoying the

extra episodes from us.

These are the little bonus ones.

You know, you guys send in so many questions we couldn't possibly fit them in our normal

episodes and you give Izzy more work.

Also, I just really love, these are the slightly more out there questions that I really, really enjoy.

So please keep them coming because people ask questions that I wouldn't necessarily think of.

And I just love it.

It's brilliant.

I get very excited to ask them to you guys to actually see if we can get to the bottom of them.

But I think we're starting on an easier one this week. And there's this really nice question from Timsy on Twitter, and I thought we could all answer it. And they say, looking at Saturn through a school telescope when I was a kid, made me absolutely fall in love with astronomy. What made you fall in love with astronomy and, of course, Saturn?

Robert, do you want to go first?

I can because I know Becky's going to rave about Saturn.

However, however, yeah, I'll ask that.

I think it was probably my late dad taking me out with a really rubbish telescope, actually,

because a lot of them were not very good and still aren't. And just going out into a field and looking at some stars and trying to work out how to focus it and just realizing that you could see much more through a telescope than you could with your eyes. So that for me was it. I mean, this would have been in light polluted in North Bristol in the, well, in the 1970s, you know, looking at things then. So yeah, that really did it for me. And then actually

slowly building up my own knowledge over time as well and, you know, getting slightly better

telescopes and pairs of binoculars and starting to understand the night sky and then wanting to

study it as well. Becky, what about you? So I vividly remember the 1999, almost total eclipse that we had in the UK. I think it was total down in Cornwall, wasn't it? But it was around about 97% or something in Lancashire where I grew up. And I was nine years old. And I remember thinking, wow, like this is incredible. My school did a big thing for it. We had the little eclipse classes that I was, you know, watching it at home and just, I think that was the moment I was probably hooked. I think from that point on, I was like, right, space books please, mom. This is what I want for my birthday. And I think that was when I fell in love with Saturn just from the images in those in those books as well. But I didn't see Saturn through a telescope for a long, long time until after that. I think the first time I actually saw it was during my undergrad, and I'd already picked to study astronomy and astrophysics by that point, but it was the first time that I'd actually had access to one of these not-so-good telescopes, that's what I was saying, but they're not so good, but they're also so incredible that you can see as much as you can with them that you can get your hands on. It was just like the student astronomy society's telescopes that they, you know, cobbled together. And I just remember being absolutely blown away. I think what's nice about Saturn as well is if you've got, you know, even a 60mm refractor is just about enough to see the rings. I guess it shouldn't surprise us because Galileo almost saw the rings, right?

They've discovered in the 17th century.

So you sort of think you've got to have something really amazing to see them.

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