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Posts tagged as “astronomy”

LSS 96: Juno Reveals Lightning Flashes in Jupiter’s Atmosphere; Third Grade Students Build Engineering Projects

Photo courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt.jpg

In today’s episode, we feature an interview about research on Jupiter’s atmosphere. 

Candice Limper speaks with Yury Aglyamov, a graduate student in the Cornell Department of Astronomy. He discusses his analysis of data from the NASA Juno spacecraft that reveal lightning flashes in the atmosphere of the planet Jupiter. Aglyamov is an author on a paper recently published in Nature, “Small Lightning Flashes From Shallow Electrical Storms on Jupiter”. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2532-1

Depiction of a simple bridge design and build engineering project (photo courtesy of “DSC06025” by Barrett.Discovery is licensed with Creative Commons BY 2.0)
Spencer Hill, 3rd Grade Teacher at Cayuga Heights Elementary School in Ithaca, NY (photo courtesy of S. Hill)

Later in the show, Esther Racoosin speaks with Spencer Hill. He is a 3rd grade teacher at Cayuga Heights Elementary in the Ithaca City School District.

After schools closed in mid-March of this year due to COVID-19, Hill and his colleagues, Kim Snow and Emily Graber, decided to continue to instruct their students to practice simple design and build projects.

Hill applied for a Red and Gold grant from the Ithaca Public Education Initiative to provide funding for the supplies for the projects. In this episode, he speaks about what it was like to instruct the kids to do these projects at home with their families instead of with their peers at school. To learn more about the Ithaca Public Education Initiatives, and their teacher grants, go to https://www.ipei.org/

Producer: Esther Racoosin

Interview of Yuri Aglyamov: Candice Limper

Music: Joe Lewis; Blue Dot Sessions

LSS 79: The Pale Blue Dot -Anniversary & Astronomy Special

In this episode, we celebrate two significant anniversaries! This month is the 3rd anniversary of Locally Sourced Science, and we celebrate it with a new music and voice introduction by Joe Lewis. We also celebrate the 30th anniversary of the famous photograph of planet Earth taken from the farthest point ever. This photo that Carl Sagan titled “The Pale Blue Dot” was taken by Voyager I on February 14, 1990.


To celebrate this anniversary, Mark Sarvary spoke with Lisa Kaltenegger, director of the Carl Sagan Institute, and with writer and director Nick Sagan, Carl Sagan’s son. Kaltenegger talks about the Voyager 1 mission, the Pale Blue Dot picture, and the Carl Sagan Institute. Nick Sagan spoke to us about the legacy of his father, who was both a scientist and a storyteller.


Sagan wrote in his “Pale Blue Dot” book: “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. … There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.”


Image Caption

This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed ‘Pale Blue Dot’, is a part of the first ever ‘portrait’ of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager’s great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up image of the Earth was taken through three color filters — violet, blue and green — and recombined to produce the color image. The background features in the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL

Producer: Esther Racoosin

Interviews: Mark Sarvary

Science News: Liz Mahood

Science Events Calendar: Esther Racoosin