Crash Course Astronomy: Outtakes 2

When you watch an episode of Crash Course Astronomy, I’m sure you think to yourself, “Wow, this is surely the most polished and amazing series that has ever graced YouTube, nay, all of media since time immemorial!” because most people talk like a mad scientist from a 1930s movie in their inner monologue.

It actually takes an hour or so to commit a script to video, due partly to camera framing changes (from close up to wide, and so on), but mostly because it’s really, really rare for me to get a segment said out loud without messing it up in some way.

Reading a script out loud is way harder than you’d think, even when you wrote the script yourself (which I do, plus of course edits from Michelle Thaller, my science adviser, and Blake DePastino, the script editor). It’s also hard to know when your mouth is drying up, when you’ve misread something you’d swear you got right, or when a typo comes up that somehow wiggled through the editing process.

The result? Another outtakes reel.

For some reason over the past few weeks I’ve really wanted people to see the top of my head. Maybe subconsciously I know it looks a lot like Mercury, or maybe Ceres.

If you really want to make this a psychedelic trip, turn on closed captioning. There’s software that tries to interpret what’s being said, and sometimes it’s, um, not as accurate as it could be. Unless I actually did say, “did get that’s practice the Kurdish women.”

Though honestly, what I did say was “That’s breakfast the Gurgich way!” so maybe I shouldn’t make fun of it.

P.S. We do an outtakes reel after every 10^th episode. Here’s the first one, and you won’t have to suffer through another one for 2½ months.