Heard on the Radio!

Evidently, people still listen to the radio - at least given the number of folks who let us know they heard us on NPR's Morning Edition yesterday morning!  The 6 minute clip, linked here, is a story about amateur astronomy in Tucson.  It starts with the Venus transit on June 5th.  We then give the radio crew a tour of the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab under Arizona Stadium where I work, and it ends up at the Sky Bar, where telescopes entertain the sometimes-tipsy patrons at a 4th Avenue tavern. 

I had been alerted to the upcoming piece last week - they called me 5 days before doing some fact-checking to make sure their script was accurate.  I set out an e-note to our Tucson astronomy group letting them know it was going to be on.  Unfortunately, we were on the road, in small-town Iowa attending my 40th high school reunion, but with Melinda's computer, we found the show streaming on-line and got to hear it "live". 

If you go to the above link, Melinda also makes an uncredited appearance as "UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1"!  So do check it out if you have speakers attached to your computer, otherwise you will have to be satisfied with reading the transcript at the same link.  I generally live on the NPR stations in southern Arizona and northern Illinois full time, and it is great that they archive most programming for all to access.  Meanwhile, you can get a taste of astronomy in Tucson where we're perhaps a little more sensitive to the machinery of the universe which controls the whirring of the orbs over our heads.  Keep Looking Up!