YouSaid · the spoken record

Maggie Aderin-Pocock

lines on the record
58
first
2010-03-07
most recent
2010-03-07
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Yes, with a telescope that large you get so much light. What you actually want to do is analyze that light. And I was working at University College London building an instrument that would actually link up with the telescope called a spectrograph. And effectively, it makes rainbows. So it takes the starlight from billions of miles away, puts it through various optics, and then stretches the light out into its rainbow colors. And from that you can actually work out what's happening in the heart of a star. So you can see chemical reactions, you can actually see perhaps clouds of gas between us and the star. And so it gives us very detailed analysis by looking at its rainbow light.”

    2010-03-07 · Desert Island Discs · Maggie Aderin-Pocock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Diameter of the lens? The diameter of the mirror. Lenses, because the light passes through them, you can get sort of corruption of the light passing through. If you use a reflective surface because the light bounces off, you can get much better image. So most of the big telescopes we talk about these days are mirrors. Telescopes are like gathering buckets, and the bigger the bucket, the more light you can get, and so the fainter objects and the further you can see out.”

    2010-03-07 · Desert Island Discs · Maggie Aderin-Pocock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “The Gemini Observatory is a beautiful eight meter telescope in Chile, eight meters for a telescope. That's some of the largest telescopes we have on Earth.”

    2010-03-07 · Desert Island Discs · Maggie Aderin-Pocock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think mine talk probably of the order of six months because what you do is you actually grind your own mirror and that was what made it so wonderful this is something I'd made myself Indeed, yes, and to create it myself and then to look at the moon and see the craters jump out. It was just magical, especially”

    2010-03-07 · Desert Island Discs · Maggie Aderin-Pocock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, it was quite fortuitous because I was living in Candon in London and I saw telescope making classes in an adult education centre. Telescope making classes? Yeah.”

    2010-03-07 · Desert Island Discs · Maggie Aderin-Pocock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Suffered from something called chromatic aberration. So if you're looking at the moon, you have multiple images of the moon all smeared out in different colours and the”

    2010-03-07 · Desert Island Discs · Maggie Aderin-Pocock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I was about fifty when I made my own telescope. I wanted one from longer than that, and I actually bought one, but it wasn't very good. What was wrong with it?”

    2010-03-07 · Desert Island Discs · Maggie Aderin-Pocock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I think I am a bit of a lunatic. Literally. Literally, yes. I find it mesmerizing. It would be a nasty place to live. There's no atmosphere. And you'd have to walk around in spacesuits all the time. But at the same time, it's so beautiful.”

    2010-03-07 · Desert Island Discs · Maggie Aderin-Pocock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source