This episode of Astronomycast is brought to you by Swinburne Astronomy Online, the world's longest running online astronomy degree program.

Visit astronomy.swin.edu.au for more information.

Astronomycast, episode 294 from Monday, February 18, 2013, Aerosybo Observatory.

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 Kane, I'm the publisher of the universe today, and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville.

Hey Pamela, how are you doing?

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

Good, back from an epic two-week vacation down the west coast of the United States.

We went to Oregon and San Francisco and Los Angeles.

We went to Griffiths Observatory, we went to NASA, we went to Pixar, the Natural History Museum. It was awesome, and now back.

And you did all of this with your kids and you crammed in business and life and everything else along the way?

Yeah, exactly. It's a business, it's a tax write-off. Yeah, so no, it was good. It was really fun.

If you've never done that trip, you've ever gone down the west coast of the United States, I highly recommend it.

It's a beautiful chunk of the world.

It really is. So is those western Canada and Alaska. So really just like star up at the very straight and the city.

Maybe you can drive, yeah, you pretty much can't drive north of Vancouver along the coast like that.

Yeah, so you got to take a ferry.

Oh, okay.

But now you have an announcement this week.

I do. So we had great success.

Last fall, teaching a series of different classes through CosmoQuest.

It's our Cosmo Academy program, and we are offering two more classes this spring.

...