StarStuff

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:

1. 

   for-all-mankind:

   jstn:

   The wheels of three Martian rovers, left to right: Sojourner (1997), Spirit/Opportunity (2003), Curiosity (2012).

   Curiosity is the size and weight of a Mini Cooper with a top speed of 0.05 mph. It lands August 6th.

   Did you know that the rectangular “holes” on the bottom of Curiosity’s wheels are not for better movement or traction? They spell out the letters J P L in the Martian soil in Morse code every time the wheels turn. JPL is immensely proud of their robotic work, and always puts their logo on the things they send out into the Solar System. NASA has a strict no-advertisement policy, and admonished them for the little JPL logo stickers on the previous Martian rovers. Being engineers with humour, they came up with the Morse code idea. When the NASA guys found out about this, they said (and I quote) “Those sons of bitches did it to us again!” How do I know this? I was at the Kennedy Space Centre for her launch, and in the presentation in the ExplorersWanted building, where the mock-up was located, the presenter said it to us. I then overheard those NASA men ask him if it was true and make that remark.

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   (via TumbleOn)

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   Wheels of the martian rovers.

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    “Those sons of bitches did it to us again!”

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