Month: August 2013

Well it’s been an exciting few days, and all thanks to the Perseids meteor shower from the Comet Swift-Tuttle. I only managed a brief look last night because I had to be up early to appear on Sky Sunrise to talk about the event. Unfortunately, through no fault of my own, I missed the slot because the taxi took sooo long to get to the studio. Such a shame. However, straight after I was due to talk about the Perseids on the BBC News Channel and I made this slot with time to spare, and time for a much needed cup of tea too. It was really fun to try out the new studio in Portland Place (the last time I was on the BBC News Channel it was still in the old BBC building just before they moved over), and the presenter Simon McCoy was really funny in between filming which relaxed me a bit. Anyway, it’s not all over for the meteors, I’ll try to catch some tonight…cloud looks to be clearing again so fingers crossed. And if not, there’s always next year, or November for the Leonids.

Anyway, if you missed it all then click here for some beautiful pictures of the Perseids taken by others and published in The Independent.

Last week I gave a talk to the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) about ‘Sampling the mysteries of the space by sample return of comets and asteroids’. The BIS are based in London and the turnout for the talk was good. There were lots of questions from the audience after my talk and this continued in the pub afterwards so was lots of fun. I’ll post a link to the BIS write-up from the talk on here when it’s available but I highly recommend joining the BIS if you want to learn more about various space-related topics. They have regular talks and are a really interesting bunch of people.