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Through the Looking Glass

TED Radio Hour

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The Future of Stargazing

The Rubin Observatory will photograph the entire southern sky every few days, over and over following a preset pattern for 10 years. Computers and algorithms affiliated with the observatory will then compare every pair of images taken of the same patch of sky looking for anything that's gotten brighter or dimmer. Right now, we discover about a thousand supernovae every year. But naked eye astronomy can still sometimes be kind of cool. The best recent example is actually something that happened about a year and a half ago to the star Betelgeuse.

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