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SYFY WIRE Bad Astronomy

Announcing Crash Course Astronomy!

By Phil Plait
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I’ve been hinting for some time about a secret project I’ve been working on, and the time has finally come to announce it:

I’m writing and hosting an online astronomy video series!

The series will air on the PBS Digital Studios YouTube network starting in January and—get this—is done as part of Hank and John Green’s Crash Course video series.

Yes, that Hank and John Green, the Vlog Brothers. Hank approached me about it last summer, and we quickly worked out the details. I recently started writing the episodes, and the first few will be filmed extremely soon.

Regular readers may remember I visited Hank in his Montana fortress of solitude last August and filmed a special episode of SciShow about how we know the distances to stars, as well as a SciShow episode about the smallest known star in the Universe. Of course, that’s all we told the public. Behind the scenes we were plotting and hatching our nefarious scheme.

I’m really, really excited about this. I’ve been a fan of Hank and John for a while, and this is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. They have an excellent production system, and I know this is going to be a lot of fun.

Along with Crash Course Astronomy, there’s going to be a new U.S. government series hosted by Craig Benzine (aka WheezyWaiter). I know, you’d think he’d be doing a chemistry series, but Hank already had that covered.

In fact, Hank made a video describing how all this works (the good part starts at 2:43).

I’ll keep y’all posted when the time nears for the premiere. In the meantime, you can read more about all this at Re/code. You can also support Crash Course at Subbable.

Thanks, and see you on YouTube!

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