Looking Up

Five minutes at the end of each week explores the big and the small questions in astronomy, cosmology, and space science. Hosted by Kechil Kirkham, no subject is too big or too small, and experts are regularly brought on board to illuminate and excite. Cape Town is the place to be for astronomy, with some of the largest telescopes in the world housed or being built not too far away. Looking Up takes advantage of the shoals of scientists and engineers working on the planet’s most advanced astronomy projects, who live and work right here in the Mother City. Kechil has recently acquired an MPhil in Space Studies at the University of Cape Town, and works in South Africa’s space industry on the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope.
Weekly English South Africa Places & Travel
430 Episodes
260 – 280

Looking up - 13 December 2019

NASA's Parker solar probe has been sending us unprecedented detail about our nearest star, as it flies within the corona of the Sun, a mere 7 million kms from its centre. Switchbacks, intense magnetic flips, and erratic solar winds are some of the new phenomena observed by the spacecraft. It's…
13 Dec 2019 4 min

Looking up - 06 December 2019

Five minutes at the end of each week explores the big and the small questions in astronomy, cosmology, and space science. Hosted by Kechil Kirkham, no subject is too big or too small, and experts are regularly brought on board to illuminate and excite. Cape Town is the place to…
6 Dec 2019 4 min

Looking up - 29 November 2019

Things that go BANG! in the night ... Kechil interviews Masters student Reikantseone Diretse from the University of Cape Town about his remarkable coup co-authoring a paper in the most prestigious journal, Nature. This is about his work examining the data from our local MeerKAT telescope concerning a massive Gamma…
29 Nov 2019 4 min

Looking up - 29 November 2019

Things that go BANG! in the night ... Kechil interviews Masters student Reikantseone Diretse from the University of Cape Town about his remarkable coup co-authoring a paper in the most prestigious journal, Nature. This is about his work examining the data from our local MeerKAT telescope concerning a massive Gamma…
29 Nov 2019 4 min

Looking up - 22 November 2019

Professor Miller Goss is a giant in the history of radio astronomy and is a former director of the Very Large Array in New Mexico, USA, where Kechil interviewed him about the extraordinary telescopes of the VLA. He now writes books about the history of radio astronomy, which is relatively…
22 Nov 2019 5 min

Looking up - 15 November 2019

Those striking images you see, many from the Hubble Space Telescope, of swirling colours and bright stars, are not simply taken with a camera. There is a highly involved process leading from the initial instrument (which only actually sees in black and white) to our eyes, which are very poor…
15 Nov 2019 4 min

Looking up - 08 November 2019

The Sky Guide Africa South 2020 is out! Find yours online or at a bookshop. Come along to watch the Transit of Mercury to the Eden Cafe at Bloubergstrand on 11 November from 2:30 onwards until sunset. Lastly - why is Neptune hotter than expected? And don't complain ever again…
8 Nov 2019 4 min

Looking up - 06 November 2019

Kechil recently visited the Very Large Array - a radio observatory - in New Mexico, USA. Here she talks to David Finlay and Summer Ash about this extraordinary observatory and its links to South Africa.
8 Nov 2019 4 min

Looking up - 01 November 2019

Satellite images can be used to monitor whales and perhaps even avert mass strandings. Find out how. Also participate in witnessing the Transit of Mercury on 11 November at Eden Cafe in Bloubergstrand from 14:30 to sunset.
1 Nov 2019 5 min

Looking up - 25 October 2019

Satellites do wonderful things for us, keeping telephony and entertainment going as well as navigation, power station timing, weather reporting - in short we would be hard-pressed to run the modern world without them now. But how many do we really need? Recently SpaceX gained US approval to launch 12,000…
25 Oct 2019 4 min

Looking up - 11 October 2019

Can you believe it here in Cape Town Apollo 11 - The Ballet. This will be a luscious spectacle with 250 performers and of course 3 fully suited astronauts. The Director of the Cape Ballet Centre, Evelyne Aregger, chats to Kechil about its astronomical inspiration. Tickets are on sale now…
11 Oct 2019 4 min

Looking up - 04 October 2019

Flaring black holes - black holes gobbling up stars - all happening silently in space, far far away. Dr Itumeleng Monageng describes his latest research, revealing a greedy black hole with an accretion disc that regularly brightens every 9 hours and we don't know why. But we are thankful that…
4 Oct 2019 4 min

Looking up - 27 September 2019

Not your every day job: Professor Roger Deane of the University of Pretoria studies far away objects in the universe using an extraordinary technique in astronomy called gravitational lensing. This is where a massive object such as a black hole distorts light coming from objects far, far behind it, acting…
27 Sep 2019 4 min

Looking up - 20 September 2019

Astronomers face many technical challenges observing, but you may not have thought volcanoes were one of them. If you build your observatory on top of a volcano however, you can expect some problems. Here Dr Grazia Umana from the Catania Observatory in Sicily talks to Kechil about how they manage…
20 Sep 2019 4 min

Looking up - 13 September 2019

What all about space telescopes: Kechil runs through some facts about the Hubble Space Telescope and its 2021 successor, the James Webb, which has recently passed a major engineering milestone. It's a big complicated project so it can be forgiven for being 12 years late, so if your projects are…
13 Sep 2019 5 min

Looking up - 06 September 2019

The latest from the Chang'e mission to the Moon where they've found unexplained gel-like substances on the surface. Plus name a planet! The South African Astronomical Observatory is running a competition. Go to www.saao.ac.za for more details.
10 Sep 2019 4 min

Looking up - 23 August 2019

These are a few of my favourite things: the Voyager 2 mission, and that Tesla roadster in orbit around the Sun. Kechil describes why she likes the Voyager mission and what is so special about it. (Warning: Nudity).
23 Aug 2019 5 min

Looking up - 16 August 2019

Sutherland is where the South African Astronomical Observatory has its telescopes, and many international ones besides. Dr David Buckley talks to Kechil about what's happening and about the latest telescopes coming online. You can pay a visit! See www.saao.ac.za for tour details.
16 Aug 2019 5 min
260 – 280