Of telescopes and continents

The May episode of the Jodcast is now out in the wild. Getting everyone in the same place to record it is proving harder and harder and this month we were spread over three continents. The main interview is with Dr Carole Mundell and is about gamma-ray burst (GRB) observations with the Liverpool Telescope. The Liverpool Telescope is fully robotic and has lots of programs and scripts running to automate the rapid observations needed once a GRB alert happens. Apparently she even gets automatic emails and text messages from the telescope in the middle of the night!

We also get Tim joining us over Skype from the European Southern Observatory at La Silla, Chile. It was pretty cool to be able to talk to him whilst he was on the mountain and find out what he was up to. He has let us use some of his photos from the past few days in the May shownotes. I'm very jealous.

Finally, I chose the cover art because it related to the GRB topic and I thought it was pretty interesting. It certainly isn't your traditional pretty picture.