The episode starts with 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”.  

Anna:  

Three, two, one

Nic:     

Hey Rebecca.

Rebecca:    

Hello Nick how are you?

Nic:     

I'm not too bad. How are you?  

Rebecca:    

No, I'm fine actually, and I look forward to producing this podcast with you.

Nic:     

Yes. What is the name of this podcast?

Rebecca:     

The Meridian and we're going to have a lot of astronomy guests.  

Nic:     

Yes, and this is episode zero. Is it not?

Rebecca:     

Exactly, this is just an episode sort of introducing ourselves to the world.   

Nic:     

That sounds like a good idea. Put a name behind the voice.

Rebecca:     

Yeah, exactly.  And who are we?

Nic:     

Uh, we are Rebecca and Nick.

Rebecca:     

Exactly PhD students at Lund Observatory.

Nic:     

Yes, studying astronomy, right?

Rebecca:     

Yeah exactly.  So this podcast. As I said, we will have guests from here at the department but also from the university.  And we will also invite Katherine Ros, Who is editor of a Popular Science magazine, to help us explore the universe.

Nic:    

Yeah, exactly, and Katrin is quite articulate and very well knowledged about this kind of stuff, so she's also a lot of fun too.

Rebecca:    

Yeah, yeah, of course.  Uh, we wish to have more international people, but because of the pandemic, that's not really going to happen.

Nic:     

Yeah, it's a bit of a shame we can't have international people here. You know, like it's a bit lonely being in Australian locked up and but you know maybe one day it'll be better.

Rebecca:     

But you know, as you say, the university and the department, especially, is very international so...

Nic:     

That's true yes, yes, and I think we'll have a lot of fun finding out where everybody is from.

Rebecca:     

Yeah.  Besides our guests, we will be very busy this fall. We have Researchers night but also Astronomy day and night.

Nic:     

I've always wondered, so Astronomy day and night everyone. What...?

Rebecca:     

It's it's a thing that is happening here in Sweden, it's ‘Astronomins dag och natt’, it's a day when we celebrate astronomy, but we can get more into that in one of the episodes.

Nic:     

OK. Well I'll I'll follow up on that then.

Rebecca:     

And we have Culture Night, which also is a big happening here in Lund, World Space Week and Future Week.

Nic:    

So a lot on our plates to cover.

Rebecca:     

Exactly, but I think we'll manage.

Nic:    

What do you think about the intro to this episode?

Rebecca:     

I really liked it, but what's it from?

Nic:     

So it's actually funny, I helped to record it with our producer Adam.

Anna:     

I'm here.

Nic:    

Who is great.  The 2021 Astronomic Youth Research School helped us make this.

Rebecca:     

Ah, right, kids who visited here and made all that great research.

Nic:     

Yeah, some really astute scientifically minded young kids in high school. Just sort of came in and then we had the idea to make a word cloud of them talking about space stuff and then eventually converging onto ‘the Meridian’.

Rebecca:     

And I really liked how it matched with the Twilight music from Stellardrone.

Nic:    

Yeah, I think it makes a really nice vibe and really, you know, allows astronomers to cross our Meridian.

Rebecca:     

Yeah, exactly. And stay tuned for having astronomers crossing this podcast and this should be a lot of fun.

Nic:     

Yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

Rebecca:    

Yeah.