StarStuff

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About Me

Hi, I'm Stuart Gary, I'm a journalist and broadcaster with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I love science, especially the majesty and wonder of space, so I put together a weekly astronomy show for the ABC called StarStuff.

In my spare time I like to fly planes, practice karate and pistol target shooting and play around with my cars, a twin Turbocharged Falcon GT Interceptor and a DeTomaso Pantera GTS.

I’m vegan, a life member of the RSPCA and a supporter of several animal welfare organisations.

My other great passion is music which is understandable when you realise that I was a radio music jock long before I became a journalist. My record library contains tens of thousands of singles, albums, videos, CD’s and DVDs. These days that’s all stored in an 8 terabyte raid enclosure linked to a desk top PC at home. My tastes range from rock and grunge through to trance and new romantics. At the moment I’m listening to heaps of MGMT, William Control, Hawthorne Heights and Short Shack, but I have lots of time for the classics like Placebo and the early stuff from Silverchair, In fact Neon Ballroom is still my favourite album, and Emotion Sickness is still one of my two favourite songs (the other being William Control’s Death Club).

StarStuff is a great name for the show, but it works on more levels than just astronomy, it’s really cool for any science program because everything in the universe after the quark gluon plasma of the big bang is star stuff even the iron which makes your blood red was manufactured in the supernova explosions of stars. Carl Sagan said it best, we are all star stuff.


This blog is designed to allow me to publish all the things which can’t fit into StarStuff. There’s heaps of really interesting stuff out there and only a half hour window for the show, so each week becomes a battle to try and squeeze it all in. This blog lets me do that.

You can check out the show at the offical ABC StarStuff website:
http://www.abc.net.au/science/starstuff/

There's also an official ABC StarStuff Twitter feed: @abcstarstuff

And an official ABC Science website: http://www.abc.net.au/science/


The legal stuff: This is my personal blog. The views expressed in this blog are those of me only and not the Australian Broadcasting Corporation or its management. I do not claim ownership of any of the media in this blog. where possible credit and or source will always be given. If one of your photos or other media is submitted in this blog and you would like it removed please let me know.

Blogs I follow:

Theme by: Miguel
  1. Opportunity’s Selfie NASA’s Mars Rover Opportunity catches its own late-afternoon shadow in this dramatically lit view eastward across Endeavour Crater on Mars. The rover used the panoramic camera (Pancam) between about 4:30 and 5:00 p.m. local Mars time to record images taken through different filters and combined into this mosaic view. Most of the component images were recorded during the 2,888th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity’s work on Mars (March 9, 2012). At that time, Opportunity was spending low-solar-energy weeks of the Martian winter at the Greeley Haven outcrop on the Cape York segment of Endeavour’s western rim. In order to give the mosaic a rectangular aspect, some small parts of the edges of the mosaic and sky were filled in with parts of an image acquired earlier as part of a 360-degree panorama from the same location. Opportunity has been studying the western rim of Endeavour Crater since arriving there in August 2011. This crater spans 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter, or about the same area as the city of Seattle. This is more than 20 times wider than Victoria Crater, the largest impact crater that Opportunity had previously examined. The interior basin of Endeavour is in the upper half of this view. The mosaic combines about a dozen images taken through Pancam filters centered on wavelengths of 753 nanometers (near infrared), 535 nanometers (green) and 432 nanometers (violet). The view is presented in false color to make some differences between materials easier to see, such as the dark sandy ripples and dunes on the crater’s distant floor. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.

    Opportunity’s Selfie

    NASA’s Mars Rover Opportunity catches its own late-afternoon shadow in this dramatically lit view eastward across Endeavour Crater on Mars.

    The rover used the panoramic camera (Pancam) between about 4:30 and 5:00 p.m. local Mars time to record images taken through different filters and combined into this mosaic view.

    Most of the component images were recorded during the 2,888th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity’s work on Mars (March 9, 2012). At that time, Opportunity was spending low-solar-energy weeks of the Martian winter at the Greeley Haven outcrop on the Cape York segment of Endeavour’s western rim. In order to give the mosaic a rectangular aspect, some small parts of the edges of the mosaic and sky were filled in with parts of an image acquired earlier as part of a 360-degree panorama from the same location.

    Opportunity has been studying the western rim of Endeavour Crater since arriving there in August 2011. This crater spans 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter, or about the same area as the city of Seattle. This is more than 20 times wider than Victoria Crater, the largest impact crater that Opportunity had previously examined. The interior basin of Endeavour is in the upper half of this view.

    The mosaic combines about a dozen images taken through Pancam filters centered on wavelengths of 753 nanometers (near infrared), 535 nanometers (green) and 432 nanometers (violet). The view is presented in false color to make some differences between materials easier to see, such as the dark sandy ripples and dunes on the crater’s distant floor.

    Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.