Full Transcript for Summer nights with Andrew Reimer - INTERVIEW - Dave Reneke 'Astro Dave'

you know you're going to ask me where can I have a look? Book? The best best time is late evening to around midnight. 00:03:07 Speaker 1: Right, and where would you look? Where would you look? Or can you go live stream somewhere? 00:03:12 Speaker 2: Yeah? Probably will if you want to go on trail on the internet, you probably do that. But I must say it's the only way you're going to do it, Andrew, because it might be really visible to you. Even if you had a pair of anos. You've got to know exactly where to have a look. And you know, once the sky is duck, you got to know exactly And I don't have any details on that. I don't think many people would, and even if you did, you'd only see a tiny little dot moving. But that's not the point. This is another comet, a comet and a piece of another solar system that we've never seen before. It's a third one and unfortunately now from a Harvard professor and Abby Lowe who has become the joke of the entire scientific world by proposing that this is possibly a spacecraft inside an asteroid. 00:04:01 Speaker 1: Anyway, chevity has been chbody's been watching too many movies. 00:04:05 Speaker 2: I think, so it did las the imagination of people love that, you know. With the wild we've got today and the stuff that's going on around there, it's a little bit of escape as if you will. But look it is nice. I mean in the job that I have, what I do here, and why I'm up to talk about this stuff is that we're learning more. We're able to see more than you've ever thereon before. And we've got telescopes now, and you know, computerized systems now that work those telescopes that allow us to see these sort of things. When we say a comet, comets are interesting, they we think are the things that seeded life here because when the Earth was warming, the Earth was bombarded by comets. Now, these comets come from outside the Solar system in a ringy rocky material around called the Kayper build and further out the odd Cloud. Now we know that by finding samples of the heads of comments over the years and meteorized and things are an asteroids. We know we found, you know, the basic DNA structure in some of these. One of these is in meteor from Victoria in the late seventies, the emergency mediaite which I had a little bit of something to do with the analysis that showed a little bit of DNA structure in there. So we think that you know, this comment, if we could have grabbed it would have been a very very scientific prize, very very valuable scientific prize if we could analyze it. But we'll never see it again us on a one way journey. So we're seeing for the first time, you know, one of three objects that were never ever part of our solar system from some of the sols. 00:05:36 Speaker 1: A right, what time period have the three come into our solar system? 00:05:42 Speaker 2: Only in the last few months. These things don't travel all that quickly relative terms of our moving fairly fast and You've got to understand that the solar system is pretty big. It takes a while for them to go. Comets usually head towards the Sun, spin around the stun and come back shoot the cat into space, and then they return again. These are the ones we know about. You know, how is ali comment? Is? How this comed is one of those It does that. But these are on a one way. 00:06:10 Speaker 1: Journey, not. 00:06:18 Speaker 2: Like that. Look just the thing about it, and you said, you know, this is just this as a visitor. This is from somewhere else. We've never seen it before. And it just shows you that, you know, these comments can travel around other soul systems. Maybe the life we've got here, this is this is really pulling a long though. But maybe maybe if one of these comments came by in the past and when the Earth was warning and collided with the Earth, we may be we may be the result of a life from somewhere else that evolved here for that reason. You know. 00:06:54 Speaker 1: Wouldn't that we've had this, we've had this conversation in the past. Wouldn't that throw a span on the. 00:06:59 Speaker 2: Works we have? And the new shows how life can be how called pantheraphomia, How life can be spread throughout the universe by these passing objects called collins and asteroids. 00:07:11 Speaker 1: Yeah. Hey, if it had been a few days later, maybe the twenty fourth of December, people would have maybe speculated that it was going to be fun for Christmas. 00:07:19 Speaker 2: Christmas. Yeah, there's a beautiful businesses in the sky there, that's this morning star. But look, I just enjoy the nice sky. If you get a telescope Christmas bonds, good on your head out for the hills, go where it's nice and dark. But if you do get a telescope or Christmas, please go down to your amazing observatory down there, the one you've got in Adelaide there we've talked about sometime before. The planetarium you've got down there, that will certainly give us some advice on you. 00:07:52 Speaker 1: Oh beautiful. And I was actually going to ask you that question. With Christmas just around the corner, just a few days away now, Dave, with a Christmas present for a child who's fascinated with the cosmos, with the universe, with all things to do with astrology and astronomy and all that. 00:08:08 Speaker 2: Sort of business, what are the best you mean? 00:08:11 Speaker 1: Yeah, what would be a good Christmas present for somebody is looking for something for a child with an interest in space and everything up there. 00:08:19 Speaker 2: We kids, even now young kids know how to use computers. What I suggested is go and have a look at the star sends S T S n C. See. There are a group of telescopes that are produced now andrew that are monecority priced, not real deer. But they've got the vision to put your iPhone, your iPad on there and it'll dial up on the screen whenever you want to look at it. Can't find it for it, So when you go to Adelaida Optica will go to help you down there. But go to anyone who sells telescopes.

Don't buy them at the apartment store. Go to a camera shop and buy one of these celloscopes. Be careful of the price too, Anything under three hundred dollars in Australians generally junk. And make sure you get a quality telescope. Got a little bit of weight to it. If it's two lights going to wabble in the breeze, no good. My advice is go down to the planetarium, ask them what you think. But there's a new type of telescope for young people which has taken the world by storm. And I believe I still believe it's all star since Michael Worth, while having a look online for that, I here in yourself. Well, Ben tell b I n T E L. And they do distribute right around the. 00:09:26 Speaker 1: Stret Well, it's come a long way since Galileo, hasn't it. 00:09:29 Speaker 2: Oh you bet? You know the telescopes today. 00:09:33 Speaker 1: Yeah, but even when you think about it, that sort of level of technology in Galileos a day too. Just to be able to come up with that is quite phenomenal. 00:09:44 Speaker 2: Oh, he was phenomenal. He didn't invent the telescope. He picked the idea up from a Dutch optician. There was yeah, yeah, he was the first one to put him in a tube Andrew. And the funny thing about it very quickly. The guy who found this idea was hands Lip. He was a Dutch spectacle maker. And the story goes that he was grinding two different strength lenses and he's down in his house. He's a boratory there, but he held them up to the light of the chechnic clarity, and he held one in front of the office a low street in the high Street, and he noticed that things came a lot closer. He approached the Dutch Navy with a new invention. They didn't even want to know about it. Galileo and Rome heard about it, ordered some of those lenses from him and was the first person in history to put him into a tube to make the first telescope. And do you know what with that little telescope he discovered the rings of Saturn, the mers of Jupiter, and we realized that the Moon had greatest honor for the first time in history. We are a lot to Galileo, no doubt about that. 00:10:49 Speaker 1: You would have been You would have been over to Gretitch too in the UK, wouldn't you. Yeah, isn't that? Isn't that amazing what they've got over there? And again go back to the you know, one hundred or two hundred years ago, whatever it was that the technology that that they were able to discover. Here we are in Australia working out why we have fluff on our belly button. 00:11:11 Speaker 2: They did it with no equipment. It was just human engineery. And I remember a quote when I was learning my physics in the early years. I remember a quote from from Newton who said, if I if I've seen more than most men, it's because I've stood on the shoulders of giants, that that is. 00:11:34 Speaker 1: And yeah, that quote of course attributed to Burt Newton. Sorry, Dave, I mean one of those. I mean one of those moods. I'm in one of those moods. 00:11:47 Speaker 2: I can't tell, Andrew. But it's good to be able to talk to you too, to talk to your audience is and have a merry Christmas you. 00:11:53 Speaker 1: Two, Dave, you too, Dave. I look forward to it, and thanks again for coming on the program, really appreciate it. And next blaming all about this this comment the third one of its type to make it through our solar system. We don't know where it's come from. We just know it's going somewhere. 00:12:10 Speaker 2: Very everything, by bye, bye bye, thank you very 00:12:13 Speaker 1: Much, Astro Dave Dave Rennick