Episode 1 Stargazing Live

Good evening it's Stargazing Live 2014 and the weather is perfect.

Tonight we bring you one of the great spectacles of nature. These

are the famous Northern Lights, the Aurora borealis, one of the most

beautiful sights in the solar system. For the next hour, we're

taking you Aurora hunting, live from your own arm chair. Look at these

extraordinary images of Saturn, the woman responsible for them is here

at Jodrell Jodrell Bank. Well as all that, we're looking at the most

extreme weather across the solar system with a live weather report

from Mars and the very latest from Venus, Mercury and even from the

surface of the sun. I'm Brian Cox. He's Dara O'Briain and this is

Stargazing Live. Lovely, welcome to Jodrell Bank

Observatory in Cheshire, our usual home as ever, as well as an

ambitious hunt for live Aurora, we have incredible things lined up for

you. It's a rare privilege to meet just one astronaut, tomorrow night

we have two generations of astronauts in the studio, icons from

two eras of space travel. Apollo seven's Walt Cunningham will tell us

what the pioneering days of exploration were really like. And

fresh from his mission aboard the International Space Station, we've

got noted David Bowie fan, Commander Chris Hadfield, on living in space

long-term. Whoa. Dara is off to find out what

intergalactic travel feels like and what makes astronauts weightless.

Brian investigates what could power a starship. And how we know what the

Milky Way looks like. Plus we're asking for your help over the course

of the next three nights to discover previously unknown galaxies. If

intergalactic travel makes it look like your squashed head, I'm not

doing it. I genuinely thought I would look cooler. This year we take

on our enemies, the clouds. Though it is bute fli clear -- beautifully

clear here tonight, last year they stopped any attempt to stargaze. So

Mark has gone somewhere different. Where are you? Hello, the south and

east of the country with well known for having the best chances of clear

skies. I decided to come back to my local astronomy patch. I'm at

canning heath in north Norfolk. I'm join by the astronomy society. We've

driven across the country this morning and we've almost struck

gold. We've had wonderful clear skies earlier on this evening. You

can just about still see Jupiter over my shoulder. We took this

footage earlier on this evening. It's a little windy now. This shows

features in the clouds of Jupiter. Those features have been carved by

some really extreme space weather. The belts are the example of high

speed winds across the planet. There are fantastic astrophotographers

amongst you. We want to see your pictures. Please upload them to our

photo group websites. I'll be back later in the show to show you which

planets can be seen in the sky tonight, for now, back to the boys

in the studio. It's all ready and -- it's already an historical

Stargazing Live, because it features actual stars. We're here to answer

your questions as well. If there's anything you want to know about

Aurora or Saturn send her your questions. The addresses are on the

screen right now. Over the next three nights, we're going on the

hunt for the elusive Northern Lights, with the aim of bringing

this emto you live on -- bringing them to you live on camera. That

sounds easy. Why is it the first time anybody's done this? It's never

been done before as far as we're aware on live television. One thing

is the equipment. We filmed during Wonders of the Solar System. These

were filmed in the usual way with an SLR camera and a timelapse. Now we

have cameras that are sensitive enough to do that live, in real

time. That's what we hope to do. The second thing is the Aurora are not

very well understood. Notoriously hard to predict. It's hard to

predict whether they'll appear at all and how to predict where you

should look for them. There is a general idea that we have that,

well, there's a particular region. This is Dara's fantastic rotating

hol sphere. -- holosphere. Your massive, glowing ball. Very fond of

the glowing ball. There's Africa. There's Europe. This is the Arctic

Circle and where we think it will occur. This is why we have sent Liz

here to the very north of Norway to Tromso. Liz, are you there? I am

here. Welcome to the research facility. We're about 200 miles

inside the Arctic Circle. We're much closer to the magnetic North Pole.

This time of year it's pretty much this dark 24 hours a day, marking it

perfect to go -- making it perfect to go hunting the Aurora borealis.

As luck would have it, look at what's going on behind me. What do

you make of this? Oh! How fantastic is that. That is incredible. That's

beautiful. That's beautiful. When we filmed it in 2010, it didn't look

like that. What you did see were the plumes rising up from the mountains.

There's an old Norse myth about it being spirits suspended between the

earth and heaven. It being loos like it raises -- rises up from the

mountains. You're in a science research facility at the moment, but

the clouds have cleared and it's there. Yeah, remarkable. Fantastic.

Congratulations Liz, more of this, please.

We'll do our very best for you. You can't believe how excited we were.

It's been completely overcast all day. About half an hour ago, as we

were setting up our positions and cameras and rehearsing, the cloud

cover opened up to reveal the stars and this incredible, wide arc of

green light stretching from the mountain behind me, all the way over

our heads to the other horizon. It has a lot of structure to it as

well. We will keep our cameras trained on this spectacle for the

show and beyond, of course. We will also show you what's going on here

at Ice cap. Scientists here study the Aurora by making their own. Make

sure you come back to us soon. This is just wonderfully exciting for us.

Fantastic. Probably more than we expected to a certain extent, you

can see structure, not just a glow. Beautiful. Fabulous. Let's get to a

fundamental question, what causes the Northern Lights? They're all

linked back to the weather, not just here, but on the sun. We switch to a

view of the sun here, the sun isn't as uniform when you look at it. It's

a boiling mass, varieties of temperature and magnetic field. This

image was taken last week. The surface is roughly at 6,000 degrees

Celsius. Fairly uniform. You have bright spots on the sun, which are

1,000 or 2,000 degrees hotter. They're activity. The sun throws out

something called a solar wind, which is charged particles, so pro tons

and electrons. It throws them out very fast and a lot of them, five

billion tons an hour. We are sitting in the stream of this? Yes, we have

a magnetic field on earth. The sun has a magnetic field. This solar

wind, especially when the sun is active, can carry the magnetic field

of the sun to the earth. It distorts the earth's magnetic field. It

stretches it out. This is the night side of the sun. Tromso is there.

The magnetic field is stretched out. It gets stretched and stretched

until it snaps back. That accelerates the charged particles

down towards the poles. The charged particles, like a particle

accelerator, smash into the atoms in the upper atmosphere and make them

glow. You see that glow. That beautiful glow behind Liz is a

direct representation of our connection with our star, with the

sun. It's the sun reaching out over 90 million miles and affect ING

Directly the atmosphere of earth. It's beautiful. This shot is a shot

from last week from the sun, a 360 degree view from the sun. We have an

even more up to date view here. This is over the last few days actually,

going onto this morning. The sun is very active at the moment. You see

those are actually flares that you can see. These are Coronal Mass

Ejections. They cause the wind to become stronger, faster and

stimulate the Aurora. It shows the sun is extremely active at the

moment. We're not the only planet that enjoys aurorae. We have a view

of Jupiter. If we spin it down, as we tilt it forward, that's the pole

on Jupiter, and they have an Aurora as well. So beautiful. Jupiter has a

very strong magnetic field of its own. There's a moon in particular

which is the most volcanic body in the solar system. That's spraying

material, particles out. They are caught by Jupiter's magnetic field,

accelerated and down to the poles. Then there's Saturn. This is taken

by the Casini satellite. This is the glowing atmosphere of Saturn being

bombarded by the solar wind of the sun. They were taken by Casini. We

will talk to Carolyn Porco in a moment. First, here is a look at how

pictures from missions like Casini have inspired us.

In 1979 Voyager arrived at Jupiter. I must have noticed that in

television or a newspaper. I was 11 years old. I was so fascinated that

I wrote wrote to NASA. In 1981 they wrote back and sent me these

pictures. These are Voyager at Jupiter. They also included some

pictures from Saturn. This is the kind of thing that makes a

scientist. Voyager's images inspired scientists to send a more powerful

camera into space. Three... Two... One... And liftoff. On 15th October,

1997, the Casini space craft was launched. Its final destination was

Saturn. Seven years later, it passed through Saturn's rings and made it

into orbit. Ever since, it's been sending back the most astonishing

images of this extraordinary planet. But these photos aren't just

beautiful, they're scientific observations.

They've shown us Saturn's rings, 300,000 kilometres across. But as

little as a few metres thick. They contain chunks of ice and rock. Some

as small as a grain of sand. On its moons, they've revealed huge foun

tins of ice and giant lakes of methane, the first liquid found on

the surface away from earth. Casini is still up there today and a

few months ago, it took the opportunity to turn around and look

back at where it came from. So on 19th July, 2013, while I was

in America, I joined people across the planet to take part in earth's

ultimate self-portrait. So it's just after 3. 30pm in Salt Lake City

Utah, and a billion miles in that direction, so just over the trees

next to that little cloud, there is a space craft, Casini. At the

moment, it's angled so its camera is point ING Directly at us -- pointing

directly at us. It will take a photograph of earth suspended in the

rings of Saturn. It will open its shutter in 18 minutes' time. If we

wave now, then the photons of light will travel and we will be in one of

the most iconic photos of human history. I think we should wave. I'm

going to wave. We can say hello. Say "Hello Saturn!" Here is that picture

and here is Carolyn Porco. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having

me. The day the earth smiled, why did you do it? This is the day the

earth smiled. I wanted to take a picture of the earth from the orbit

of Saturn, ever since I was made the imaging team leader for the Casini

mission because I had been involved in the first Voyager one pale blue

dot. I wanted to make it better. I wanted to invite everyone across the

globe to participate in this interplanetary photo shoot and just

take the moment to think about how lucky we are to live on such a

beautiful planet. The pale blue dot is the iconic image. This is your

pale blue dot. That's a zoom in. That is the earth. Everybody should

know when they look at this picture, this is a moment frozen in time,

when people around the globe, including you took time out to smile

and celebrate life on the pale blue dot. It's a wonderful thing because

we're all in that picture, all of humanity. We're all there. It

represents how far we've come in the exploration of the solar system.

Risk of embarrassing you here, you've had a hell of a career, by

the way. You worked on Voyager, you were part of the imaging team or

working on the imaging coming back on the rings on Voyager and then

Casini, which is impressive in itself. But how much of a difference

was it from the images you'd got used to working with from Voyager to

the step up from Casini? You have to understand, those of us who studied

rings and that's just one example, we were looking at the same pictures

for 23 years before Casini got in orbit around Saturn. It was like

having eye surgery. These structures you were so familiar with became so

clear and beautiful. This whole mission has just been a God send.

It's been, I think, the most scientificically productive mission

we've ever had. This is an image, I think the first colour image from

Casini. This is a model here. It is not just beautiful pictures, the

camera takes beautiful pictures. This is the first one taken by

Cassini. Of Saturn. A year and a half before we got into orbit and I

can tell you that it was stunning. This is Titan. This is Saturn and it

was our destination in space and it was in our minds for 14 years. Your

main science interest was the river system. When you see the Cassini

image of the rings, it is unbelievable. Restructure, we did

not know what caused it before we had Cassini. This is the shadow of

the Moon that slipped onto the rings. How can something integrate

and delegates exist like this? You are looking at the B ring. There are

not many satellite residences. This is where the moons go round and

gravitationally affects it? That is not going on here. It goes on in the

a ring, but here there is such a dense system of particles that they

have their own gravitational attraction and it leads to waves in

the rings, and allows us to study it better. What we have learned is that

there are other discs and they work in a similar way. That is why we

wanted to study Saturn's rings because they are a textbook in how

solar systems are formed. They help us to understand the dynamics of the

stars and material in galaxies. Your main research interest was the rings

but there is also intense weather on Saturn. It is a big planet and you

get the weather. There is this picture which shows the development

of a storm of the type that only happens once every 30 years. These

storms are corrupt like volcanoes. You do not see them for 29 years and

then there they are. There is a lot of power in this. Cassini was there

to witness the evolution of the storm. It was lightning and

thunder, and we got to hear it and observe it. It was just a real

excitement to understand. There are a number of different questions. A

number of people have written in about this. What about the Hexagon?

The polar Hexagon. If we post a feature on this, we get lots of hits

on our website. It has nothing to do with Crystal energy and in fact, it

is not that weird. It is a very stable jet stream that has waves in

it and is not unlike our... If we look at our jet stream, it is

chaotic. This is looking down at the poll, it is real data. You can see

the undulations in our jet stream. At any one moment, there are four or

five. Look at the amplitude in that. Saturn is more regular. There is no

landscape and it is less complicated. We are not really sure,

it it could be just the circumstances on Saturn. This is

right on the pole? Yes, it is. I chose these colours because it looks

so beautiful, like a rose. It is like of a rose. It is like VI of how

McCain on the Earth. From here to here is 1200 miles though a bit

bigger than our home against. You will join us later and I know there

will be lots of questions on Back to Earth. These storms are a natural

occurrence but there are building blocks and there is a recipe that

needs to be followed. Let's start with the naked rock that is floating

in space. Like mercury, the closest planet to the sun. Here are the most

extreme temperature differences anywhere in our solar system. Mine

is night, and 450 by day. That is not what we would call weather.

Wind, rain, thunder storms... Nothing on Mercury moves. For that,

you need to add an atmosphere. Any gas will do. There is helium and

hydrogen on Neptune. Oxygen and nitrogen on Earth. All hold in place

by the firm grip of the planet's gravitational pull. Atmosphere alone

will not give you weather. You need heat as well. If you are close

enough, you can get that from the sun. Of course, the Equator will

warm the most, and the atmosphere here will rise, drawing the cooler

gases down from the polls to replace it. All at once, you have winds.

Further out in the solar system the sun's heat is feeble. Beyond Mars,

you need a different source of heat to create weather. A molten core

like the gas giant of Jupiter will do. It reaches temperatures of

24,000 Celsius and sends out wins of boiling gases to meet the planet's

freezing exterior. In Neptune, immense convection currents drive

winds of 1500 miles an hour. That is not the end of it. You can whisk

things up even more with a bit of planetary spin. Wind will be

diverted, making jet streams that circle the planet. There are

cyclones, how McCain is and great vortices like this. -- how McCain

's. Like this, the great red spot. When things are on the move, the

right mix of temperatures can force gases to become liquids. You will

get clouds which means rain. Not just water. How about torrential

suffering acid? That happens on Venus. -- sulphuric acid. With rain

comes lightning. On Jupiter it is ten times more powerful than

anything recorded on Earth. On other planets weather reaches extremes

that we never see on Earth. But studying them can help us find out

more about our own. We have the most complex weather in the solar system.

This is an image of the surface of Mars. It allows us to see a weather

report. There are wins that move. We have lots of weather stations there.

We have Curiosity. This is for today. Because of the movement of

winds, we get dust storms as the wind moves south. This is remarkable

because when I was born we had not landed on the surface of Mars and

now we have weather stations wrote it is fantastic. Larger storms will

appear. We have mostly clear skies with a few ice clouds arriving in

the afternoon. Temperatures have reached a high of -36 degrees and

will drop to -88 overnight. Tomorrow will be warmer. I see a new career!

The thing about stargazing is after the show has finished, go outside

and the skies are beautifully clear. You can look at these planets

and let your imagination roam and imagine the weather on the surface

of Mars. Mark is here to tell us where and when you can find Mars and

the other planets. There are a few planets visible in the skies this

month. You can see plenty of skies overhead but you will need to adjust

your sleep pattern to see the planets. I am here with the

knowledge Astronomical Society. What you enjoy about looking at the

planets? For me, the biggest challenge is to capture surface

detail on the planets. It is demanding but worthwhile. We have

seen some wonderful detail on Jupiter, but Mars can be seen as

well. This is what it will look like through an amateur telescope. It

rises in the east at midnight in January. We are treated to another

gas giant if you can get up at 3am. It is one of my personal favourites

and it is the planet Saturn. This is what it looks like. I took it a few

days ago and I never tire at looking at the planet. There are stargazing

planets going on up and down the country. Take a look at our website

to find an event near you. I may see you there. Yes, please go and see

the planets for yourselves. They are all out in the sky. Liz Bolling

brought some incredible footage already. Let's go to Norway and see

whether we are getting even more of a show. Thank you very much. We are

still enjoying the most spectacular light show from the Aurora

borealis, the Northern Lights. Incredible shifting patterns and

intensities. An intense green colour in a massive art over our heads. We

cannot believe how lucky we have been because for the whole day it

has been overcast. It is only in the last half an hour have the clouds

opened up. We have been treated to the most amazing surprise. That is

part of the thrill of hunting Aurora borealis. That makes them not always

be difficult to study. Scientists here have been trying to unravel the

inner workings of the Northern Lights and how they affect us on

Earth. They do not just wait for Aurora but they can make their own

as well. This is the latest chapter in trying to discover the secrets of

Aurora in Norway. The Northern Lights are steeped in folklore.

Legend has it that they were created by a magical fox sweeping his tail

across the sky. Or that they were firestorms caused by angry gods.

Some people even told their children they could not play outside unless

they wore hats. Some people believe that if they whistled they could

summon Aurora. It is surprising how recently we started to understand

what really causes Aurora, and it all began as a controversial fringe

theory. At the beginning of the 20th century, a Norwegian scientist was

investigating the Earth's magnetic field and noticed that the needle on

his compass went haywire when Aurora appeared. He theorised that an

electrical storm was occurring. He tested it in his laboratory. He

fired a beam of charged particles at a small magnetic sphere and saw that

it was channelled towards the poles where it made the egg glow just like

the Aurora about the polls of the Earth. -- Aurora glow. He suggested

that a similar beam of electrical charge must be hitting the Earth and

that it came from the sun, 93,000 miles away. It was a radical theory

that was almost unanimously disregarded by the scientific

community as nonsense. Only light, they argued, could travel through

the emptiness of space. When the scientist died, his baby remained

ridiculed, but 60 years later, a satellite detected electrical

current is high in the atmosphere just as he predicted. They are

called Birkeland currents and we know that they are caused by

particles from the solar winds. A century after his ground-breaking

discovery, he was hailed as one of Norway's greatest scientists and he

is something of a national hero. We still don't completely understand

the science of aurorae. The work continues in places like Icecap. The

experiments here aren't confined to a lab. Scientists study artificial

aurorae, which they create high up in the ionosphere by heating the

air. From the control room, the lead scientist activates a bank of 144

high-powered radar transmitters which focus a thousand megawatts of

energy onto one point, 200 kilometres up in the sky. All that

energy heats that patch of air so much, it glows, just like an Aurora.

Special wide-angled camera monitor the night sky and the artificial

Aurora appears as an orange circle pulsing on and off in the middle of

a screen. Is that the Aurora there? Yeah,

yeah. It's a little dot. That's it. It's about 40 kilometres in die

yamer to, in fact. That is -- diameter, in fact. That is

incredible. Being able to create aurorae on demand means the

scientists can easily study their effects on us, for example, how they

interfere with satellite communications. Tonight we are

looking at satellite signals from the Russian navigation satellites.

We're going to be producing irregularities that will affect the

satellite signals. With the Aurora in place, researchers can send test

signals in the sat lite and detect any -- satellite and detect any

interference. People often talk about how dangerous aroara are for

technology, is it definitely something that needs more research?

Yeah, think so. -- I think so. If satellite navigation is used for

precise navigation in the Arctic regions, we need to understand the

effects of the ionosphere better. With me is Ian McCree. We can't

believe our luck here. This is very special as well, because we're

filming the Aurora in realtime using our specialist cameras. We're being

treated to a very good light show, aren't we? We're very lucky. It

gives you a sense of how dynamic it is, how it's moved and changed. The

Aurora is a culmination of a lot of solar activity, some of which can be

quite harmful to us. Can these charged particles damage our

technology? Yeah, this ecan. The earth's atmosphere is filled with

these charged particle. The dangerer is that they can then penetrate

things like space craft, satellites, get into the control circuitry and

threaten communications and control. Can they also create difficulties on

the ground? They can, yes. What you're seeing up in the night sky

there is the flow of an electric current. It's flowing over our

heads, which we will try -- which will try to induce a current in the

ground. When that finds a good conductor, like a power grid or

pipeline, it will jump into that and try to flow through it. The poster

child of that damage was an event in Canada in 1989, where there was a

big solar flare, followed by Aurora's as far south as you can

imagine. Completely knocked out the power. As

well as the charged particles, the wind is spewing out other radiation

during solar storms. How can they effect us? Big solar flares produce

a lot of X-rays. That can be a danger to high flying aircraft. So,

again I'm talking about the big events here, not ones like this. Not

aircraft flying everywhere? The main concern for solar events is with

polar routes, because the earth's magnetic field shows us some

shielding for low latitude. But high latitude it is like a gateway

through which the particles can find their way into the earth's

environment. Something to be thinking about a bit more. It's

something people are becoming more aware of. Thank you so much, Ian.

You know, solar storms on the scale of the one in 1989, they don't

happen very often. But we are ever more reliant on technology, which

means forecasting solar storms is something people are thinking about

a lot more. Can I leave you with these incredible images for a

moment. See you in a bit. They're very nice. I wish I'd pushed

harder when I said we should be the ones to go to Tromso. You are

possibly right. It's interesting saying it's just not why I a pretty

face. You're looking at -- not just a pretty face. You're looking at

curbents -- occurents. -- currets. -- currents. There was a Carrington

flare, they are one in a thousand years event, but they show the

connection. The solar wind blew Mars away. That wind was strong enough to

take the atmosphere off into space. Aren't rain bows we're watching,

they're a physical region of space, you could fly through an Aurora?

Yes, a rainbow is just light, rain drops acting as prisms. Here you

have the glow of the atmosphere. The atmosphere itself is glowing because

of the energy of these particles hitting the molecules and at Toms in

the atmosphere. Now, we come to a part in the show where you get to do

something, our interactive online challenge. A couple of years ago,

you discovered a new planet and last year, you explored the surface of

Mars from your living room. This year, our challenge relates to

something key to the work done here at Jodrell Bank. Do you think the

war is going on? We can only pray for peace. Yes! 300 billion galaxies

in the observable universe, it is the task: Find galaxies that we've

not yet discovered. An object the size of the Milky Way and we want

you to find it. Hundreds of billions, even up to a trillion

stars in these islands, these galaxies. There are some that we

can't see. They're obscured. We are going to ask you to find them. That

sounds tricky. Using techniques developed here. Yes. We are going to

invite Professor Tim back to Stargazing Live again. Welcome back

to the show. How will viewers discover undiscovered galaxies?

We're using an incredible natural effect called gravitational lensing.

It was predicted by Einstein nearly 100 years ago. He suggested that

mass basically bends space, it curves it so that light doesn't

travel in straight lines, it bends around objects. Which is a

remarkable idea. We're talking about the curvature of space and time. I

have a demonstration. These are galaxies way off the distant

universe. Maybe so far away the light has taken ten billion years to

reach us. I have any lens here. If I put it in front of the screen

there... Yeah, yeah. The lens is like a galaxy between us and the

distant galaxies. The light is bent around it by the curvature. The

galaxy bends space which bends the path of the light towards us. We

shouldn't see the galaxies, but the light comes to us. These galaxies

could be very distant, faint. This distorts them and brightens them as

well. If we look at it again, closely, you can see a very strange

things happens here. Get it in the right place and you get... There.

There! That's an Einstein ring, where you are lined up between the

lens and the galaxy. The light is bent round. Thank you very much.

This sounds like an abstract piece of physics, so you may be wondering

how it's possible for you to get involved. Chris is going to explain

to us. How will it work? We want people to go to a website, there's a

link on the Stargazing website as well. We have put up 40,000 images

of galaxies and no-one has looked at these images before. We have

selected galaxies which we think have a good chance of lensing

distant objects. We want you to sort through the images. We need about

half a million images to be viewed in the next 48 hours, here's an

example of one. You have a lensing galaxy, the yellow blob in the

centre. If you can see that arc there, that's the lens. Look for

things like that. That is the light from a distant galaxy, billions of

light years away. The light from the blue curve there has taken seven

billion years to reach us. This is the glimpse of the early universe we

get because of the lens. We might find unusual stuff, there are

clusters. A cluster of galaxies? You're looking at the curvature of

the fabric of the universe here. The curvature of space time. We get a

glimpse of the distant universe and we get a chance to do physics. We

get a chance to weigh the galaxies. We can work out how much the light

is bent and how much stuff is in that cluster. Can people join in? Go

to the website. Click here and it will take you a minute to get going.

Then you see an image that no-one has seen. You're seeing light that's

journeyed for eight, nine, ten billion years. Yeah to be captured

by a telescope, recorded by our cameras and put on the website for

you. It's a very human task, this pattern recognition is something

that people are really good at. We know computers can't find these

things. The key thing is people shouldn't be put off. It sounds

technical. But you can discover galaxies very simply. To our website

and find the link to your website and we can process the images. Do

you get naming rights, mining rights, do you get to own the

galaxy? Yeah, but you have to get to the galaxy yourself. If two people

find it, they can have 50 billion star galaxies each. Mark now? He's

out under the stars. I'm not sure if the weather has been kind, but the

opportunity of discovering your own galaxy is exciting. This is footage

from just half an hour ago of the And romeda galaxy. Even at 2. 5

million miles away. The Milky Way make up the majority of the stars in

our night sky. But one star is particularly close to us and visible

in the daytime sky. It is our own spectacular sun.

Every day, and almost every location on the planet, our sun puts on one

of the most dramatic displays in the natural world. Sun rise, it's a

breath taking sight that we all too often completely ignore. And for

amateur astronomers, the rival of the sun needn't be a sign to pack up

the telescope, if we know how to observe it, it can be a fascinating

target. It's vitally important you always observe the sun safely. Never

look directly at it with the naked eye, you can cause permanent damage.

With relatively cheap sciment, you -- equipment you can unlock our

star's secrets. The simplest and safest way is with a pair of these.

These aren't ordinary sun glasses. They're normally used for observing

solar eclipses. These just cost ?3. Always check there's no damage to

the lenses. Pop them on and you can simply look directly at the sun.

Straight away you get a sense that the sun is a living body. I can see

some dark patches. There's a large one about 7pm. These are the sun

spots. They look really fascinating. Here, viewed by satellite, these

spots are places where vast magnetic fields punch through the visible

surface. They're darker because they're cooler, though they're still

well over 3,000 degrees. It's amazing that for just ?3 I can look

at the surface of a star. The sun has many more visual treats in

store. Though to see them, we need to get the toys out. We need a

telescope. Remember safety is paramount, don't just point the

telescope at the sun and tick a peep through it. If you have a finder

scope, leave the finder cap on, or take it off because it still focuses

the sun's light. There are a number of safe ways a standard telescope

can be apt daed. This is a white light filter, but one of these will

cost you about 60 quid. Again, make sure you've checked the filter isn't

scratched and off you go. Oh, wow! Viewed like this, suddenly a grainy

texture becomes visible on the sun. This is actually the surface

churning as energy convects outwards from the core. It takes about a

million years for the heat to transfer from inside the sun to the

surface, and then it takes just eight-and-a-half or just under that

for it to reach us here on earth. That's stunning. My favourite solar

spectacle needs more than your standard astronomy kit. Seeing it is

an experience I would like to share so I have come to Wiltshire to show

people a special telescope. This is a hydrogen telescope. It is mid

range but similar items cost ?500 so it is fairly serious, but I promise

you, if you look at the sun through this then you will never see the sun

in the same way. This is a very special solar telescope. You should

be able to see a red desk. That is the sunrise. Unlike a normal

telescope, these telescopes filter out red light. The red light

filtered by hydrogen atoms at 20,000 degrees. This shows us not be sun's

service but the atmosphere is. Can you see some stringy bits? They are

dates of the sun being taken off the service by the magnetic field. --

the field. Have you ever seen the sun? Never! A few years ago, you did

not need to spend tens of thousands of pounds. Today's technology gives

you a real chance to get outside and explore the hidden life of our

nearest star and it is an experience you will never forget. Yes, any

reports we do about looking at the sun has to do have safety warnings.

There is a risk of blinding yourself. I prefer an old trick of

taking one of these, a phone, and downloading the application. There

is a NASA app. You can see the sun there. Let me hold it so you can see

a clear image. It's looks like a flare. You can see the sun twist up

and snap back and reconfigure and throw in this intense solar flare.

Anyway, let's go back to lives for one last time and look at the

spectacular Aurora and the effects that the objections are having in

Norway. Thank you very much. We were told that the sun is in a solar

maximum in an 11 year cycle. It has been good to night, having not, Ian?

We were lucky because it was cloudy. It is not just how active the sun

is, there are lots of other factors. Tell me the science behind the

colours because this is an intense vivid green. What does the green

mean? That spectacle is going on 100 kilometres above our heads that

there is air up there. We are looking at the interaction of the

air and the molecules of oxygen and nitrogen that make up the upper

atmosphere. The green light is coming from the oxygen. As the

particles come in, they give a kick to the particles of the upper

atmosphere and the electrons are raised to hire energy levels. They

are excited but they do not like to be excited. They give out a photon

of light and that colour of the photon is characteristic of the

amount of energy giving up. Are they energetic particles? Yes, there are

more energetic ones but not tonight. There are different types of

colours. We have a time-lapse of all the different colours. There are

purples and blues and some red. What is the red? That is atomic oxygen.

The colour tells us that it is less energetic and the electrons are

getting a smaller kick from the particles from Aurora. What about

the pinks and blues? This time we are looking at nitrogen, particles

in the nitrogen. So essentially, when we are looking at Aurora, we

are seeing the gas particles getting rid of the energy they do not want?

That is a nice way of putting it. It is Aurora dumping its excess

energy. It has been a good night, has it not? You are welcome.

Tomorrow night we are going to get away from any risk of cloud cover

obscuring our view, and also, light pollution. Over the mountains there

is some light pollution from Tromso. On our mission we are going to carry

out a world first. We are transmitting live from an aeroplane

at an altitude of 30,000 feet. We have cameras rigged on the plane and

we have the technology to broadcast live, and we are going on the hunt

for Aurora borealis. We will see you tomorrow and I will leave you with

beautiful images of the Aurora. See you soon. Thank you, lives. Shooting

the Aurora life from an aeroplane will give us a different

perspective, away from the light pollution. We were very lucky. We

saw the clouds rolling in at that stage. We may have a tiny window

with this. Earlier in the show we told you about the weather on Mars.

Now for more about the Martian climate. When Nasser launched their

latest probe, I jumped at the chance to attend the launch. We started

sending spacecraft to Mars in the 1960s so we know a thing or two

about the weather on the red planet already. For example, we know that

the temperature can arrange from -150 Celsius at the poles to 20

degrees on the equator. There are dust devils as high as Mount

Everest. As we ultimately prepared to send people to Mars, the big

question is why has the atmosphere all but disappeared? This professor

is the man in charge of the mission. What we are trying to do is

find out whether the solar wind and the solar light stripped away the

atmosphere. If it goes to plan that is why we are going half 1 million

miles to find out. It has taken a team of 39 scientists and engineers

over ten years to build. It weighs 2.5 tonnes and carries nine

scientific instruments all focused on one thing. Analysing Mars's

disappearing atmosphere. It will take ten months to get to Mars. One

of the weakest challenges is getting it off the launch pad. To date, only

half of Mars missions have made it so there is a lot at stake. You are

taking a delicate piece of equipment out of an incredibly controlled

building and you have placed it on top of a giant firework,

essentially. This must be nerve wracking. Mentally and emotionally

you have you prepare yourself for that possibility. My colleague said

that this business is not for the faint-hearted. What happens if it

goes wrong? I do not want to think about it. I do not think I have the

heart to do it again. To better understand the risks, I caught up

with a man who has seen more launches than ever. He has been the

voice of more than 100 countdowns. Five, four, three, two, one. This is

the voice of George and he knows what can go wrong. Thunderstorms are

the biggest concern. If you launch a rocket, the plume coming out of the

rocket, if it goes up into a cloud that is charged, the discharge will

occur through the rocket and it can destroy the rocket. We have had that

happen in 1967. We lost a rocket because that is what happened. I

have been told that the best place to watch the launch is at a local

beach. It is a genuinely nerve wracking experience. There are a

huge number of people here and we set up for hours in advance. It is

really nerve wracking. Five, four, three, two, one. Main engines start.

Lift off! Wow! There it goes. Looking good, still 100% rate of

thrust. Still looking good. It is so loud and it is 3.5 miles away. We

can only presume that all has gone well and it is on its way. That is

an incredible thing to watch, a joy to watch. I mean, it is so physical.

The sheer power that is required. You know they are going really far

and they are not coming back! I cannot imagine, if I had ten years

of work, seeing that go. It must've been petrified. It makes it really

personal but it also lends this feeling of imagining you are sober

pig. You have created something and it is going out there and it is not

coming back. That mission was going to Mars. Mars is interesting because

we think about life on Mars. Was there life on Mars? Could there

still be life on Mars? On Saturn there may still be life present. Not

on the planet but on the moons. I know there is one moon that is very

dear to you. There it is. There is Titan in the background. It is

Titan. The two most interesting moons in the solar system are right

there. We have found that this tiny little moon, which is no bigger than

great Britain... I mean, look at this! This is not meant to be a

threat by the way! It is not a threat by the way! It is not alive

image! It is a tiny world. This southern portion, this South Pole,

it is circumscribed by mountains. It is warm, incredibly warm,

comparatively speaking. The heat is there. There are the tiger stripes.

That is what we affectionately call them. We have found that there are

100 visors. We have counted. There is water vapour that has organics in

it. This is frozen water. There are frozen water droplets, as you can

see in the pictures. Other instruments can detect vapour

accompanying this. That has organic materials in it. We think this could

be a habitat for life? It could be. It might be inhabited. It might be

snowing microbes. This is a conversation we need to extend were

me go to back to the Earth. I hope to be there Sunday. It is utterly

beautiful. What better demonstration of the reason we do stargazing life.

You can go outside into your garden. There are clear skies in

Manchester, you can look at Saturn, and you can dream of standing there,

looking at life below the surface. Time is against us. You can go

online and look at the hidden galaxy. We have astronauts on

tomorrow. We will see you for back to the Earth in a second.