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
280 – 300

Looking up - 09 August 2019

As it's Women's Day today Kechil is talking to Carla Sharpe, African Programme Manager at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, about women in space. Carla and Kechil are both space enthusiasts and have met a number of astronauts. Here they talk about the qualities needed and about the changing…
10 Aug 2019 4 min

Looking up - 02 August 2019

Dr Lee Townsend, an astronomer at UCT, tells us about the merry dance going on in the universe revealing the strange and extreme physics of binary systems, where one dense neutron star sucks the living daylights out of its companion. Sometimes these binaries end up as black holes, and other…
2 Aug 2019 5 min

Looking up - 26 July 2019

What is observational cosmology? Dr Kurt van der Heyden of the University of Cape Town's Astronomy Department tells Kechil about his interests. He asks big questions …
27 Jul 2019 4 min

Looking up - 19 July 2019

More on that fabulous lunar eclipse, and a clip of what it was like at the Observatory last Tuesday. If you'd like to enjoy the Moon some more, go along to the Cape Town Science Centre and gasp in awe at the Soyuz capsule there. Visit www.ctssc.org.za for details of…
19 Jul 2019 5 min

Looking up - 12 July 2019

The Moon! We landed on it almost 50 years ago and on Tuesday 16 July there will be a partial eclipse of the Moon. The Observatory is having a special public viewing starting at 8pm at the Observatory with a talk, proceeding with telescope observing.
12 Jul 2019 5 min

Looking up - 05 July 2019

Last week there was a total eclipse of the Sun! Sadly not for us but for those lucky souls in South America. If you write esoteric pub quizzes you can't beat a question about saros cycles. These are sequences of time used to predict eclipses. Eclipses are a form of…
5 Jul 2019 4 min

Looking up - 21 June 2019

There are many interesting parts to NASA's Artemis program to send humans back to the Moon. One of them is checking out the possibilities for habitation, and to do this they want robots to scuttle about the surface investigating sinkholes. These may protect people from radiation, though I can't think…
21 Jun 2019 4 min

Looking up - 14 June 2019

This is to clarify Trump's recent confusing tweet: For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the…
14 Jun 2019 4 min

Looking up - 07 June 2019

Did exploding stars result in humans walking upright? Latest research from astronomers suggests that a supernovae explosion increased lightening strikes, burning forests to the ground to be replaced by long grasses and shrubs. It was advantageous to walk upright in the savannah, hence bipedalism.
7 Jun 2019 5 min

Looking up - 31 May 2019

More exoplanets. Astronomers are detectives, using tiny amounts of data to infer what's going on up there. The South African Astronomical Observatory has helped to detect yet another rather exotic planet.
31 May 2019 4 min

Looking up - 24 May 2019

Astronomy Professor Paul Groote talks to Kechil about exploding stars and why there will be more and more of them as time goes on
24 May 2019 5 min

Looking up - 17 May 2019

We're all DOOMED! But how doomed? What if a large asteroid lands on Earth smashing it to bits? Can life be carried off in rocks, to land back down on Earth aeons later and re-seed the planet? The computers say Yes.
17 May 2019 4 min

Looking up - 10 May 2019

You may be tired of politics with this recent election, but space and satellite technology have a lot to do with politics and civic society. Here to tell us about it is Prof Rene Laufer from Baylor University in Texas.
10 May 2019 4 min

Looking up - 3 May 2019

The observatory is constantly upgrading its equipment, and a current project is setting out to make the telescopes at Sutherland operational remotely, so astronomers don't have to trek up to Sutherland to operate them. This has many benefits, and one of them is that astronomers can order pizza if they…
3 May 2019 5 min

Looking up - 26 April 2019

The hunt is on - astronomy as it happens! Kechil dropped in on astronomer Dr Stephen Potter at the observatory in Observatory, whilst he happened to be receiving alerts about a new gravitational wave event. Astronomers receive alerts from telescopes around the world when something happens. In this case a…
26 Apr 2019 4 min

Looking up - 19 April 2019

Twice a year the astronomical community gets together for a Star Party. This is where we spend a few days camping in a dark spot in the Karoo with our telescopes, enjoy talks and events as well as, most importantly, nights looking at the sky. Some are new to the…
19 Apr 2019 4 min

Looking up - 12 April 2019

Galaxies don't just sit there in space. They get up to all sorts of tricks. They clump together and they collide in interesting ways. Here to tell us something about them and how we know what we know about them is Dr Nathan Deg, post-doctoral researcher at the Department of…
12 Apr 2019 5 min

Looking up - 05 April 2019

The astronomical image of the year, if not the decade, is that of the black hole in the galaxy Messier 87, about 55 million light years away. This is the first time an image has been taken of a black hole and this is a major engineering feat. It took…
5 Apr 2019 4 min

Looking up - 29 March 2019

If you thirst for more after listening to Looking Up move along to www.thecosmicsavannah.com for a lengthier podcast of astronomical things happening in Africa. Plus more about asteroids - what happens when they die?
29 Mar 2019 5 min

Looking up - 22 March 2019

All water on Earth is alien. In other words, water arrived on our planet from outer space, we believe carried by asteroids. Recent exploration by the OSIRIS-Rex mission to the asteroid Bennu confirms that asteroids can harbour a lot of water. Could water in asteroids be used as refuelling stations…
25 Mar 2019 4 min
280 – 300