Tag: Emily Levesque

The Last Stargazers, Part 2

We feature an interview with astronomer and author Dr. Emily Levesque about her book, The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers.  In today’s episode, we talk with Dr. Levesque about the history and future of astronomy.  We hear about how astronomical observing at some of the premier telescopes in the world has changed over the decades, and we get a preview of what the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory has in store for the next generation of astronomers.

Host, Producer, Engineer: Joel Parker

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The Last Stargazers, Part 1

We feature an interview with astronomer and author Dr. Emily Levesque about her book, The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers.  In today’s episode, we talk with Dr. Levesque about how one becomes an astronomer and what a typical – and sometimes not so typical – night’s work is like at an observatory with highly sophisticated scientific instruments in very remote and difficult locations.

Host, Producer, Engineer: Joel Parker

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:27 — 37.7MB)

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KGNU Fund Drive with The Last Stargazers

On this week’s show  – part of the annual KGNU Spring Fund Drive – we play excerpts of an upcoming interview with astronomer and author Dr. Emily Levesque about her book, The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers. The book is a modern history of observational astronomy, and shares an inside look at the lives and stories of astronomers past, present, and possible future.

Thanks to independent publisher Source Books for offering several copies to KGNU to help with the fund drive, and to those listeners who donated and received copies of the book.

Hosts: Joel Parker, Susan Moran
Headlines: Benita Lee, Beth Bennett
Show Producer & Engineer: Joel Parker
Executive producer: Susan Moran

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:40 — 39.4MB)

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Massive Stars

Em-Flagstone-2-XL-200x300Massive stars (start time 6:45)  Dr. Emily Levesque is an astronomer who studies big stars, distant stars,  exploding stars, and truly weird stars called Thorne–Żytkow objects. All of these topics relate to massive stars – stars that are more than eight time more massive than our Sun.  Dr. Levesque is a postdoctoral Hubble fellowship and Einstein fellowship researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She received a physics degree from MIT, and a PhD in astronomy from the University of Hawaii, which resulted in the Astronomical Society of the Pacific awarding her the Robert J. Trumpler award for outstanding PhD thesis, and this year she was awarded the Annie Jump Cannon award by the American Astronomical Society for her work studying gamma-ray bursts. Dr. Levesque, is here in the studio with us today to talk about her favorite weird astrophysical phenomena and the life of an observational astronomer.

Producer, Engineer, Host: Joel Parker

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