Interview: Doug Baum on the BIPH

Astronomers spend a lot of time and money getting telescopes with bigger apertures to try to collect more photons. The BIPH (Binocular Photon Machine) is a device which makes better use of the photons you do get, multiplying the signal 50,000 times, effectively tripling your aperture.

Doug Welch and I interview Doug Baum, who along with his partner Russ Lederman, has developed the BIPH. We talk about the device, how it works and the cool ways it can be used.

Interview: Doug Baum on the BIPH (MP3, 24.3MB, 35:21, Show Notes)

Interview: Ethan Vishniac

We have another interview up on the feed! Doug interviews Dr. Ethan Vishniac, a theoretical astrophysicist and editor-in-chief of The Astrophysical Journal, “a prestigious international journal founded in 1890 at the University of Chicago. Vishniac is only the third editor since its inception.”

ApJ, as it is known, is one of the major professional astronomy publications in the world, along with the very similarly named Astronomical Journal (or AJ).

Then Doug and I spend a few minutes at the end begging for money.

More great podcasts and interviews coming up so stay tuned!

Interview: Ethan Vishniac (MP3, 30.4M, 44:05, Show Notes)

Interview: Ben Wiehe on Science Cafes

We have a new podcast on the feed featuring an interview with Ben Wiehe of WGBH on how he conducts science cafes. Subscribe to the feed or click below to listen. You can also watch the video of just the interview portion.

Interview: Science Cafes (MP3, 14.5MB, 15:27, Show Notes)

Interview: Juan Collar and Detecting Dark Matter

We bring you another fascinating cosmology interview with a genius over at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. This time we speak to Juan Collar, a name that I am, apparently, incapable of saying. He leads a group at Kavli which is pursuing several experimental approaches to detecting dark matter in the lab.

Interview: Juan Collar and Detecting Dark Matter (MP3, 28.3MB, 41:10, Show Notes)

Podcast: Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory

We have a new podcast on the feed. Doug and I discuss the Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory, supernovae light echos and buying a star. Check out the show notes for more details.

Ice Cube (MP3, 23.4MB, 25:27)

Podcast: Light Pollution

Special Correspondent Julie Wilbert brings us a podcast report on light pollution with members of the Minnesota Astronomical Society.

Light Pollution (MP3, 17.2MB, 18:40)

Subscribe!

Whatever the hell is Slacker Astronomy?

I posted this to the feed a while ago. It’s a short-ish podcast which discusses the history of Slacker Astronomy with Aaron Price, the founder of Slacker Astronomy, and includes random musings by yours truly about the future of the podcast/blog. I marked this explicit in iTunes because I use the f-word once.

Whatever the hell is Slacker Astronomy (MP3, 17MB, 18:30)

As always, we welcome your feedback so email us if anything comes to mind.

Podcast interview with Brant Robertson

We have a new show! Doug and I had a great chat with Brant Robertson, who is a Spitzer Fellow doing research at The Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. Brant is a theoretical astrophysicist involved with computer simulations of the evolution of galaxies.

Check this sh!t out:

Credit: Brant Robertson, Spitzer Fellow, KICP/UChicago

This interview is quite long so we’ve uploaded low and high rez versions. The low rez version is the one in the RSS feeds.

If you subscribe to the feed, the audio is probably already on your box. Or you can check out the show notes or download the MP3 file directly:

Slacker Astronomy podcast interview with Brant Robertson (low rez) (MP3, 24.7MB, 1:11:20)

Slacker Astronomy podcast interview with Brant Robertson (high rez) (MP3, 65.6MB, 1:11:20)

New Podcast: Slackerpedia Galactica 8.0

We just posted a new podcast to the feed: Slackerpedia Galactica 8.0: A Brief History of the Universe. So if you subscribe to the feed, the audio is probably already on your box. Or you can check out the show notes or download the MP3 file directly:

Slackerpedia Galactica 8.0: A Brief History of the Universe (MP3, 17.2MB, 36:12)

In this show Doug and I discuss the the cosmological timeline as I wrote about in a previous post. We also talk a little about asteroid 2007 WD5 and its possible upcoming impact with Mars.

First Principles 4.0 - Inside Stars

Well, we pulled our heads out of our slacker haze and managed to post a new podcast on the feed! It’s a First Principles® episode about stars.

First Principles 4.0 - Inside Stars (MP3 file, 26.7MB, 28:24)