Video Friday: The Astronomers (1991) PBS Documentary series

I have a couple videos that have crossed my feeds that I’ve been wanting to share, but I’m leery about posting videos that might contribute to our ongoing world-calamity media overload. Thus I’ve leaned toward reflective, meditative videos that hopefully allows one to take a brief break from all the bad news and find center and maybe remember the joy of being alive, with the idea that once restored one can purposefully return to the mission of ones life.

I attended a presentation on radio astronomy last night at UNLV and it reminded me of the PBS series The Astronomers (1991) . That inspired me to post the above video and links to get your own copy of the series. In episode two, Interferometry is introduced as a way to create an array of radio telescopes half the size of the earth to look for Black Holes and primary investigator, John Conway, was working from the VLA (very large array) in Owens Valley, CA. In the first episode, astronomer Vera Rubin discussed her discovery of Dark Matter, a discovery that should have resulted in a Nobel Prize. A earth-observing satellite bearing her names was launched in 2020 and an observatory in Cerro Pachon, Chile, perviously named the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope was renamed the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in 2019. There were several astronomers featured in the series, making the subject of astronomy so much more approachable and appealing. Prominent among all the astronomers was the first one featured, John Dobson and his Sidewalk Astronomers organization. Outspoken and a bit controversial (Dobson rejects the Big Bang theory), Dobson is held in high esteem for his efforts to popularize Astronomy as the People’s Science that anyone can participate in. He believed the more exposure everyone gets to direct (telescope) observation of the universe the better we will be as humans and fellow creatures on this planet. Below I’ve posted a video of a memorial gathering of Sidewalk Astronomers following Dobson’s passing. Be good to one another (and that includes the planet).