Nic:

Welcome to the last episode of season two of the Meridian. It is April 15th and we are, once again, coming to you from Lund Observatory, in Sweden.

Crossing our local meridian today we have a guest from the department of geology : PhD student Chiara Paleari, who has been studying ice cores and has discovered evidence of an ancient solar storm.

If you have been following along this season, you will also know that we have been bringing you some exciting field reporting from my observing trip to the Nordic Optical Telescope on LaPalma.  In this final episode you will get to hear about the conclusion of our observing adventure.

 

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The intro scene includes background music and 24 high school students saying astronomical words like “Space missions”,  "Solar wind", "The big dipper", "Galactic dynamics", "Gravitational waves", "Exoplanets", "Black holes", "Betelgeuse", "Dark energy", "Near earth asteroids", "Jupiter", "Ground based telescopes" and more.  Slowly it fades to everyone saying “The Meridian”.      

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Nic:

Hey Rebecca.

Rebecca:

Good morning, Nic.

Nic:

How are you?

Rebecca:

I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm a bit, you know, sad that this is the last episode of this season.

Nic:

Yeah, I know me too.

Rebecca:

But I think this will be the best episode ever

Nic:

Don't you say that every week?

Rebecca:

Yeah, but I think they are all great.

Nic:

Yeah, I think so.

Rebecca:

We've had quite an amazing people come by, so every week I like we do the episode and I'm like well this is the best episode and then the next week comes. I'm like no, no no.

Rebecca:

This is the best episode, so yeah.

Nic:

Well, I guess.

Nic:

It's fun when you're, you know you're doing something that is the best so you know, technically you are correct.

Nic:

But how about we do a bit of a review. What was one of your favourite guests that we had on the podcast?

Rebecca:

Oh, there's so many right, but I I I really like to have Josefin Martell, PhD student in geology here, talking about impact craters.  

Nic:

Right, that was in season one.

Rebecca:

Yeah exactly. I was like the second episode of the first season. So way back.

Do you have any favourites?

Nic:

I really enjoyed interviewing Michael Way actually. I found his research really interesting just talking about Venus and it couldn't be habitable. It's sort of and like the way he describes it, really captured my imagination.

Rebecca:

Yeah, that interview is really great.  I also really like talking to Ori Fox.  We talked about the James Webb Space Telescope and ever since...

'Cause then we talked about like this first image.  That's where you saw one star in 18 pieces. But now - from that - we've actually got this amazing picture where you see the one star, but also a lot of galaxies in the background too.

Nic:

I know! It was kind of crazy. Someone showed me a comparison with another telescope, and it's just this smudge of an image.  And now you've got this really sharp image and we're going to do some really cool stuff.

Rebecca:

We also had a lot of our own researchers from the observatory coming onto the pod.

Nic:

Yeah, there was Paul. We talked about Gaia and, you know, discovering a Jaffa star.

Rebecca:

Yeah, people need to listen to the episode to get what the Jaffa star is.

Nic:

Yes, I think I explained what a Jaffa is in one of the other episodes. So a few Easter eggs for you to go digging for.  

Rebecca:

Yeah, and also I really liked episode with Diane of course, 'cause we do work on quite similar things and all the way back we also had Michiel in the first episode with the exoplanets and planet formation.

Nic:

Yeah, season one. That was a really special thing.  It was the first time we were doing this thing. We didn't really know what we were doing.  But once we had that interview it was kind of like “Ok, we got this”.

 

 

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