Welcome to the 14th episode of the Urban Astronomer podcast, after a long and sustained quiet spell. Now I know how this looks: New podcast pumps out a bunch of episodes, and then loses steam before eventually just going silent one day. We’ve all seen it, we all know the signs. But don’t worry, I’ve been very busy behind the scenes, lining up a whole stack of interesting people to interview, and you’ll be able to hear them all in the coming weeks. We’ve got some top-shelf astrophotographers coming up, a guy who suddenly got a little bit famous by taking on the flat earth crowd in a live interview on YouTube, and even one of my old astronomy lecturers from university!

Today’s guest, though, is a lot less interesting: We’ll be talking to me. My darling wife and occasional co-host grabbed a microphone over the weekend and sat me down to ask me about myself, my website, my podcast, and what I’m trying to do with it all.

But then disaster struck:  While recording the intro segments, I forgot to check my inputs!  Everything except the interview itself got recorded through the nasty microphone built into my webcam, so you’ll have to pardon the sub-standard audio quality. We’ll try not to let that happen again!

Errata

At one point, while discussing ancient historical astronomers, Allen says that he wrote an article on Aristarchus who was the first person to have measured the diameter of the Earth. He was actually thinking of Eratosthenes, who was mentioned here: How do we know that the Earth is round?  Also, a stadia is closer to 170 meters in length!

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