Polish Television informs that a new popular science channel from Polish Television will be launched on 3 October 2022 and the first internet broadcast of the TVP Nauka programme will take place on 12 August.

The first programme, titled Night of the Perseids, will be an internet broadcast from the Astronomical Observatory in Truszczyna, allowing the public to watch the night of falling stars live.

The Night of the Perseids is a unique event not only for astronomy enthusiasts. Every year, we have the opportunity to observe meteor showers in the night sky. The cosmic rock crumbs fall into the Earth’s atmosphere at great speed, leaving behind luminous streaks. The best-known meteor shower is the Perseids. We can usually observe them from mid-July until the end of August. The maximum Perseid activity is between 9 and 14 August.

According to TVP Nauka, in the programme “Night of the Perseids”, Professor Andrzej Niedzielski from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, a discoverer of planets beyond the Solar System, will explain the unsolved mysteries of distant planets orbiting other stars and the exciting challenges awaiting scientists exploring the cosmos. Professor Łukasz Wyrzykowski from the University of Warsaw will reveal the secrets of the Gaia mission – an unmanned space probe of the European Space Agency, which has provided information on more than 1.8 billion stars in the Milky Way.

Guests on the programme will also include Magdalena Pilska-Piotrowska from the Astronomical Observatory in Olsztyn and Jacek Drążkowski from Gwiazdopatrznia in Lidzbark Warmiński. They will talk about meteorites that have reached Earth from various parts of the Solar System. Also, Przemysław Rudź, a science populariser, will present the latest plans for man’s conquest of space and the Polish space sector’s participation in it, while Michał Juszczakiewicz, an expert on the life of Nicolaus Copernicus, will present the astronomer’s generally unknown postulates in economics.

Adrian Andrzejewski