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Bob Berman

  • Strange Universe With Bob Berman
    So far this cold season, Earth's sister planet has heated up the evening sky like a UFO. You've surely seen that dazzling "star" soon after sunset: This has been its best showing since 2017. That eight-year interval is no accident. So happens, 13 of Venus’ years around the Sun have the same number of days as eight Earth years. They both work out to 2,922 days. Tune in to hear when you can see expect these special evenings.
  • Strange Universe With Bob Berman
    What’s the weather typically like in February? We’ll also explore the history of the famous woodchuck, and what science actually backs Groundhog Day.
  • Strange Universe With Bob Berman
    It's cold out in the Northeast. The rest of the world is using Celsius, but America is still using Fahrenheit. Tune in to hear how these calculations work.
  • Strange Universe With Bob Berman
    We stick to Earth's surface without giving it a thought. Yet can anyone honestly explain gravity, the most far-reaching of nature’s four forces? Hear about the movement of the earth and Johannes Kepler's 400-year-old discovery.
  • The solstice marking the start of winter happened a couple of weeks ago, on December 21. But it also usually delivers a lot of confusion. Hear the real surprise about our earliest sunset and just how late the sun will set this month.
  • Strange Universe With Bob Berman
    Do you want to understand climate change – really understand it – in under 3 minutes? Then pull up a chair. It all revolves around the trapping of heat, which is far simpler and more fascinating than people seem to believe.
  • Strange Universe With Bob Berman
    A lunation is the term for the Moon passing through all of its phases, which takes 29.5 days and was the basis for the calendar month. A lunation always begins with the New Moon, which will oddly happen the final days of the year, next week, guaranteeing unusual darkness for the upcoming New Year’s Eve. Tune in to hear some weird facts about the moon and the controversial statistics that indicate a bit more cloudy weather.
  • Strange Universe With Bob Berman
    If someone you know has their head in the stars, here are some last minute gift ideas. Binoculars, which can provide mind-blowing images of the things like the Pleiades, star clusters, Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way.
  • Strange Universe With Bob Berman
    If you REALLY watch the moon — the way the Babylonians did 3,700 years ago — you'll notice that its path keeps changing. We're not talking about super-obvious lunar behavior like its rapid sky movement, or the nightly shift in where it rises and sets. Some years the moon's nightly motion can mimic the sun's daytime path across the sky. Other years the moon never quite ascends as high as the sun. But the most dramatic part of the cycle is the brief three-year period when the moon gets much higher than the sun.
  • Strange Universe With Bob Berman
    Astronomers have long sought the origin of the universe, and hence ourselves as well. Using our best equipment, we observe that every galaxy cluster is rushing away from us, and from all others. For every extra one million light-years of distance, galaxy clusters recede 13 miles per second faster. When we retrace their paths we see that everything must have been in a single spot 13.8 billion years ago, which was right here. Clearly, the universe originated then and there. This week: The Big Bang!