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 298 from Monday, March 18, 2013, Space Station, Park 3, the International Space Station.

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 University and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay at Professor at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, and the director of CosmoQuest.

Pamela, how you doing?

I'm doing well, how are you doing?

Good, good. A few technical snaffos as we're attempting to start this show up, but we'll get through it.

So for anyone who doesn't know, we of course record these episodes every Monday at noon Pacific 3 Eastern as a Google plus Hangout, so you can watch us live if just getting the episode on your pod catching software isn't enough.

And you want to actually see what goes into making this show, and you get to see all of the shenanigans that go on around it, all of the mistakes that we make, all the times that we go back and have to re-record something, good times.

And for those of you who aren't able to watch live, we're working to hopefully within a few hours of each recording, get these recordings up onto Astrosphere vids.

So you can actually get the raw show much earlier than you can get the fully processed by Preston whom we love, but he can't do things instantaneously.

And we're aware a bunch of people are wondering why are there stuff on YouTube before the stuff in the stream on iTunes and stuff like that.

And it's just because there's all these steps, all these, you know, each piece we record the show and then it goes to get goes to Preston to get edited and then it comes out.

We're trying to know it narrow that gap. So that's why there's sort of delays.

So cool. Was there any announcements that you had this week?

I can't think of any other than if you're a US citizen, please write your Congress critters and tell them that we do want to see science education in America funded by the same places where the science is happening.

For those of you who don't know the proposed White House budget, remove science education from NASA, the NIH, all of the places where you have science educators partnered with scientists.

And it focuses all of the science education at the Department of Education, research is at the National Science Foundation, outreach is at the Smithsonian.

This has the potential to actually cut all of my funding and and a lot of the really awesome programs you may rely on like the night sky networks, solar system ambassadors, astronomy picture of the day, all of us are in jeopardy right now.

Astronomy picture of the day, no.

I love that that's the one that you're upset about.

...