The Sky at Night TV show, past, present and future
Inside the Sky at Night
Georgina Dransfield visited Antarctica to search for exoplanets and filmed her time there for the April episode of The Sky at Night
Right: …where she used the project’s 40cm telescope
Although it might seem unlikely, jealousy can be a healthy motivator. In my previous life as a secondary school physics teacher, I was often jealous of my students. They’d attend my lunchtime Exoplanets Club, or come to my Astronomy Olympiad prep sessions, or even spend weekends with me at the UK Space Design Competition. Watching them get so excited about space science, and seeing how it was shaping their ambitions and future plans, was really what led me to say, “I want to do that too”.
So that is what I did and four years later, I was celebrating the arrival of 2022 at one of the world’s most inhospitable places: Antarctica’s Dome C. Why was I there? My task was to install some software on a telescope’s computer at a remote research station.
When you stop and think about it, there’s something lovely about the juxtaposition of ASTEP and its surroundings. ASTEP is the Antarctic Search for Transiting ExoPlanets, a 40cm telescope at the Concordia Research Station, located at Dome C. The project’s goal is to find distant worlds orbiting faraway stars, in the hope of one day stumbling across a planet capable of hosting life. The reason I find this poetic is because Dome C is absolutely not capable of hosting life. For starters, the cold conditions are barbaric (between –30˚C and –50˚C in summer and as low as –85˚C in winter); then there is the impossibly dry air, the Sun’s refusal to behave normally (day and night cycles are daft this close to the poles), and the pathetically low atmospheric pressure. All these factors make it an exhausting and expensive endeavour to exist in Antarctica, but they also make it the best place on Earth to hunt for exoplanets using the transit method.
Signals of life
In our quest to find planets that aren’t too up close and personal with their parent stars, we must inevitably search for signals that are both long in duration and infrequent in occurrence. Our own Earth as viewed in transit by (probably) clever alien astronomers would cast a roughly eight hour-long shadow on the Sun, only once every 365 days. Signals like these need long, uninterrupted and clear nights, with very stable conditions. ASTEP enjoys all of these, simply by virtue of its location.
Throughout my PhD I have been working with the ASTEP team, most of whom are based at the Côte d’Azur Observatory in Nice. My jobs are the fun bits: I choose which planet candidates we will be observing; I juggle the schedule to ensure we make the most of our available observing time; and I get to analyse the data for planets we think we’ve validated. Recently, I also took on the development of new automatic data analysis software for the telescope, which meant I got to go along on a summer service mission to Antarctica to install and test the package.
During my stay at Concordia Research Station, I reflected on all the twists and turns in my life that led me to Antarctica on the hunt for extra-solar planets. I’m sure thousands of immeasurably small moments led me there, but by far the biggest contributors were my wonderful students: their excitement about astronomy inspired me to go back and learn more cool facts about space. I hope one day I’ll be back in a classroom to share everything I’ve learned.
Georgina Dransfield is an Anglo-Uruguayan teacher-turned-Astro-PhD student at the University of Birmingham.
Looking back: The Sky at Night
26 May 1970
In the 26 May 1970 episode of The Sky at Night, Patrick Moore visited the home observatory of Frank Acfield – an amateur astronomer and vice-president of the Newcastle upon Tyne Astronomical Society.
Before 1949, Acfield had his 10-inch Newtonian telescope set up in his back garden, and fellow society member John Croften offered to build him a custom observatory dome. It took 12 months to build the dome, mainly out of wood which was then painted with white aluminium paint to reflect the Sun’s radiation and keep it cool.
Patrick was keen on the on-site dark room and projector. As this was long before the days of digital cameras, the scope’s camera had to use photographic plates to capture the stars. A facility to develop plates as they were taken meant that Acfield could be sure he was getting the best images and that the tracking of his mount – powered by the electric motor from a gramophone – was working well.
Acfield sent his observations to the British Astronomical Association (BAA), to be used by scientific institutions. Both he and Patrick were keen to point out that astronomy is a science where amateurs can contribute to actual scientific discovery.
If you’re interested in setting up a home observatory, sign up for our Telescope Masterclass series at bit.ly/3Li3xEU
Destination Moon
Fifty years since humans last stood on the Moon, the team look back at the Apollo programme and anticipate NASA’s upcoming Artemis project, which promises to return crew to the lunar surface in 2025. Plus, they’ll reveal how to observe the total lunar eclipse on 16 May, and why the Moon is a great target for astronomy newcomers.
BBC Four, 9 May, 10pm (first repeat BBC Four, 12 May, 7:30pm)
Check www.bbc.co.uk/skyatnight for more up-to-date information
