Steve Nerlich
Steve Nerlich is a science writer, astronomy communicator, and podcaster based in Canberra, the capital of Australia. He is the founder, publisher, and host of Cheap Astronomy and a volunteer explainer at NASA’s Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, part of NASA’s Deep Space Network.
He is also a former regular writer for Universe Today, where he produced a long-running weekly astronomy column. His work centers on making astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology accessible to general audiences on a minimal budget.
Steve created and runs the Cheap Astronomy website and has produced the Cheap Astronomy Podcasts since 2008 — roughly ten-minute weekly episodes covering astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, space science, and space exploration, now numbering in the hundreds and still running. The show carries the wry tagline that at Cheap Astronomy you are only as cheap as the telescope you are looking through. The podcasts are written and produced by Steve and read by a rotating team of narrators including Julia, Barry, Duranee, and Janet. Cheap Astronomy has also contributed episodes to the community astronomy project 365 Days of Astronomy.
In keeping with its educational mission, the audio is offered for non-commercial reproduction and distribution, free of charge. The guiding philosophy of Cheap Astronomy is that anyone can do real astronomy for under $300 — including $0 — whether with the naked eye, a pair of binoculars, or an out-of-the-box department store telescope, and the site covers naked-eye observing, binocular astronomy, budget telescopes, and cheap cosmology.
Steve observes with what he jokingly calls Sky Station 1, a modest 4-inch department store telescope he bills as possibly the cheapest in the Southern Hemisphere, paired with a set of 10x50 binoculars, and cheerfully admits to trialing advanced squinting techniques in his attempts to resolve faint objects such as the Orion Nebula.
Between 2009 and 2012, Steve was a regular writer for Universe Today, where his author archive collected his weekly Astronomy Without A Telescope columns and his Journal Club series, in which he critically evaluated recent papers from the astrophysics literature.
Published under sections such as Physics, Cosmology, and Observing, his articles ranged across cosmology, dark matter, dark energy, particle physics, supernovae, neutrino astronomy, exoplanets, and the search for life, including Astronomy Without A Telescope — Could Dark Matter Not Matter?, Astronomy Without A Telescope — How Big Is Big?, Astronomy Without A Telescope — Special Relativity From First Principles, and Journal Club — Aberrant Dark Matter.
His work was also picked up by science outlets such as Phys.org, which republished Astronomy without a telescope: The unlikeliness of being, a piece applying Bayesian reasoning to the likelihood of life beyond Earth. His 100 weekly Astronomy Without A Telescope articles were later collected into the ebook Astronomy Without a Telescope, described as an easy-to-digest introduction to modern astronomy and cosmology, and also available in a Kindle edition.
As a volunteer explainer at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex — the Southern Hemisphere station of the Deep Space Network, managed on NASA’s behalf by Australia’s national science agency CSIRO and home to the largest steerable antennas in the Southern Hemisphere — Steve helps the public understand deep-space tracking and the interplanetary missions the complex supports.
Opened in 1965 at Tidbinbilla, the complex maintains contact with spacecraft ranging from hundreds of millions to many billions of kilometers from Earth.
Between 2012 and 2016, Steve undertook doctoral studies in STEM education at The Australian National University in Canberra. Beyond his astronomy communication, he has a longstanding interest in raising awareness about the uniqueness and fragility of his favorite planet, Earth.
Read more About Cheap Astronomy.
Visit his Cheap Astronomy website, and his LinkedIn profile. Listen to the Cheap Astronomy Podcasts. Follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and X.