wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) (05/13/85)
People who like hearing "StarDate" on the radio, or reading it here, might be interested in a TV version of a similar-in-purpose program. Our local (St. Louis) PBS station just began carrying this 5-minute (or thereabouts) program just before signoff, and I managed to see an airing this weekend. The announcer on it stated that they had just begun national distribution, though they had been statewide on Florida public TV for five years or so. It is called Star Hustler, and is a video astronomy-note about some current topic -- the one I saw was on Halley's Comet and its associated meteor shower (no name was given -- which shower are they talking about?). Having video illustrations of the orbits & etc. is nice, but I got the impression that this 5 minutes of high-bandwidth video gave me less real information that reading 45 or so lines of a StarDate posting... Guess TV lowers the denominator :-) One odd note -- our TV Guide lists this program as being "astrology"; when I saw that I was irked, as I don't see much use in astrology and figured that having such on PBS was a waste of the resource. When I found out that this was really *astronomy*, I was even more irked, as to denigrate astronomy by calling it astrology is an insult. If this program is on in your area, look it up in your area's TV Guide and see if they also use this incorrect term. I wonder if this is a local aberration or a national mistake... Regards, Will USENET: seismo!brl-bmd!wmartin or ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1.ARPA