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Astronomycast, episode 274 from Monday, October 1st, 2012, Asteroid Vesta.

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 Cane, I'm the publisher of University Day, and with me is Dr. Pamela Gaye, a professor at Southern Illinois University, Everett'sville.

Pamela, how are you doing?

I'm doing well, how are you doing?

Doing great. Now, you actually sort of jumped into our virtual star party last night, and you recommended that people go out and search for auroras.

There's going to be a big auroral warning. How do people do that? If they want to know when they should step outside and look up and spot the sky light on fire, how should they do it?

Well, there's a variety of different Twitter feeds that you can follow, and thespaceweather.com website.

Add it to your list of places that you go check out when you're bored. They show the latest photography coming in from different aurora watchers, and they also allow you to see forecasts for solar storms that tell you both when it's interesting to go look at the sun during the day, and when it's interesting to go look for aurora borealis at night.

Awesome. And then the other thing, and that is, I guess we wanted to announce this, which is that we've got the asteroid mappers going on cosmic questions, so people can actually go and map asteroids from from Vesta.

Although, I guess we're going to talk about Vesta, and so we'll probably get into that quite a bit as well. But where can people go if they want to map some asteroid?

You can go to CosmoQuest.org and right off of the homepage, we have a list of a link to asteroid mappers. And if you feel like just type in the whole darn thing in, it's CosmoQuest.org slashmappers slash Vesta.

And this is apparently going to be a very tongue-tied day. I have no clue what's going on other than jet lag, so I apologize for that.

See that 10 times quickly. No. Okay, well, let's get rolling then.

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So there's some topics on Astronomy Cast that we wait until we're good and ready, until the science is all in.

Well, the Dawn mission has completed its mapping operations at Asteroid Vesta, and it's now moving on to series.

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