Slashdot Mirror
BBC Astronomer Misses Meteor During Live Show
krou writes "BBC astronomer Mark Thompson wasn't having a good night for the BBC's Stargazing Live show. He turned to the camera to complain of poor cloud visibility and a lack of activity in the sky ... only for a meteor to shoot past in the background. A rather sheepish Thompson said, 'I must admit I was oblivious to it. I think I'm probably the only person in the entire country who didn't see it.' (YouTube video of the original live footage)."
It wasn't even a stupid mistake on his part. This is like someone blinking just when someone else is taking a picture. Bad timing. Is this truly newsworthy?
Does the BBC also have a "live watching paint dry" show?
He didn't turn round to the camera, he was facing the camera ready to deliver his lines on a live link. And so a meteor appears behind him with his back turned. So frigging what? There's no miss and no mistake, just a bloke looking the other way as he must to do his job. And the clouds are clearly visible in the video as well. Non-article in extremis.
It was behind him. How was he expected to see it?
This should have been posted there.
BBC tries to film meteors.
BBC films meteor.
Slashdot posts meteor.
????
PROFIT!
This is one of those things which was slightly amusing to witness when it happened, but loses everything in the retelling. It's not news, it's barely even an anecdote.
And I'd point out the three nights of live stargazing was scheduled to straddle the partial solar eclipse on Tuesday.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
... so even if he had been facing it it wouldn't have been nearly as bright to his eyes as it was on the camera. In fact it might have been too dim to see at all with the naked eye.
What a stupid summary. The guy was facing the camera, and the meteor appeared behind his back. Are we expecting astronomers to have eyes in the back of their head now?
Must be some really nice stuff the editors are smoking for this to pass as front page material.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
I think I'm probably the only person in the entire country who didn't see it.
"But I was paid a tidy sum to appear on the telly, so fuck the god-damned meteor ."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Mark Thompson, a television reporter missed the meteor because he was addressing a television camera ...
During meteor showers, which happen at predictable times every year, one can watch several meteors per minute. It's nothing out of the ordinary.
It's almost like saying "astronomer overslept and missed sunrise" in an ordinary day.
Anyone who's ever gone looking for meteors knows the feeling: the people you're with see a great one just as you were looking the other way --- it's almost part of the fun ;) --- so I agree that I don't find this very newsworthy... However, I'm also wondering how much the fact that this was being shot with a Night Vision camera (as the caption on the bottom left seems to imply?) would have affected the visibility of the meteor; in other words, even if the reporter had been looking straight at the meteor, would he have seen it with the naked eye?
The last time I had the misfortune to have my brain polluted by a Daily Mail story was when sitting bored in a physio's waiting room.
Flipping the rag open at random, I see a headline something like:
87% of Britons now members of a persecuted minority
this little nugget of wisdom had apparently been assembled by taking the percentages of various "minorities" and adding them all together.
The groups included:
51% Women
*cough* minority?
and then:
12% Single Mothers
[SubEd Are you sure we can simply add that number to the Women?] [Ed: yeah, no problem]
Debian: GNU/Linux done the Linux way
Would this have been visible without Night Vision?
The meteor would have been visible, but the presentor wouldn't.
While it's a shame he missed it, the Quadrantid Meteor Shower is still on for a few days, and it's one of the best, so natually they picked an interesting time to have Stargazing Live (although they aren't of course stars!), so keep looking and you'll probably see another.
Yes it's a shame he missed it, but as so many others have said, it's not really his fault. The only reason for his being sheepish was he'd turned to complain about lack of visibility, so yes, he probably feels a little silly, wouldn't you? I would.
Hopefully we'll have some decent meteor showers this year that arent completely obscured by days of clouds. I've been very disappointed not to see the sun and moon in days, not to mention missing out on the Quadrantids, my local Astronomical Society has a public viewing tomorrow night (8th), so I'm crossing my fingers the skies clear up some!
Astronomy is a fascinating subject and has come on massively in the last couple of decades, less than 100 years ago people really believed in canals on Mars (signs of life!), water and volcanoes on the Moon, and Venus was just like Earth, possibly covered with life!
The Manchester area (where these programmes were recorded) is renowned for being rainy and January is one of the poorest for clear weather. It would hard to find a less suitable time and place to do a live programme about stargazing (the title of the show was Stargazing Live). There was, out of three solid hours of TV - no ad breaks on the BBC - about 10 minutes of live stargazing and that was all in the first episode. If you wanted to put people OFF astronomy, you could do little worse than explaining there was a meteor show - but it was too cloudy to see. There was a partial eclipse - again too cloudy for most of the country and the only live view of Jupiter showed an over-exposed blurry ball from a long-exposure camera on a wobbly mount. The only thing that could put more people off would be to have a top-drawer celebrity explain that although he had bought 3 telescopes he hardly used them, since setting them up was "too hard" and that the views he had seen left him "rather underwhelmed".
In true BBC science programming tradition, there was lots of aspirational stuff from Mauna Kea showing large telescopes, chats with ISS astronauts and lots and lots of photos from Hubble. But ther was little or nothing to help starters get their first telescope, set it up (to demonstrate that it wasn't too hard) or even identify most of the constellations. There were brief diagrams of U. Major, Orion and Taurus but a novice could be forgiven for thinking that's all there was.
I'm just waiting for the backlash
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
He'll have a fighting chance against Triffids then?
What a coincidence, go figure! While you were posting your complaint ("waaaah!"), you totally missed out on the amusement of the story posted that was right there at the top of the page the whole time that the rest of us saw!
One of the worst things about today's society is that if you're even perceived as having made a mistake everybody will jump on you and treat you like you're the worst trash in the world. This guy made no mistakes and no gaffes of any consequence, and yet somehow it's newsworthy. Accountability is one thing, but is a culture of rabid dogs looking for the smallest weakness really the kind of culture we want to have?
Why can't 87% of a population belong to (at least) one of several minority groups?
I look forward to the inevitable parody of this in an episode of Dr. Who, with all the presenters gleefully participating. Thompson missing a massive spaceship blazing through the atmosphere in the background, that sort of thing. "Oh, bugger, not again!"
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Meteor misses you.
Unless of course you're in Siberia and it's 1908.
Huh?
During ABC News' coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks, Peter Jennings was addressing the camera while a screen behind him carried a live image of the World Trade Center towers. Millions of people saw the first tower collapse while Jennings obliviously continued to talk. It as a good twenty seconds before a staff member got Jennings' attention and told him to look at the screen; at which point the collapse of the first tower was pretty much complete.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.