I will blog my real time reaction to Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Seth MacFarlane's Cosmos remake. From the perspective of a relatively young astrophysicist and science educator.

7:20 PM CST: I love astronomy and astrophysics. When people would ask me what my dream job was since I was 16 I would say a theoretical astrophysicist. That was when I read "A Brief History of Time" by Prof. Stephen W. Hawking. Now I am at the entry level of the university or college educator career track. This reboot was made to appeal to a younger audience. So it will be interesting to see if I like this. If I don't, then it would not bode well.

8:01 PM CST: President Obama's introduction was appropriate for the most part.  He did strike a bit of a ra ra USA tone that the international audience might not have liked.  But then I'm from the USA so I liked it.   Dr Tyson's intro made it clear this was  going to be a feast for the eyes.  

8:17PM CST: I am really loving the way he's able to present the place of humanity in the universe. The scale of the universe itself...even within the Cosmos (multiverse) could be only one of 10^1000 possible universes.  Now here comes the infamous talk of Giordano Bruno.  As my colleague Hank, the brains behind science 2.0 points out the history here is likely to be inaccurate.  At best Bruno believed the right things for the wrong or at least for unscientific reasons.  

One big difference here is the presence of commercials.  The original was on PBS and so had no commercials per se.  

8:37 PM CST: Dr. Tyson does mention that Bruno was no scientist and he basically made a lucky guess.  What Mac Farlane did with the end of that sequence was a bit clever.  By the end the Cardinal looked more like caiaphas the pharisee questioning Jesus...then Bruno was posed as if Jesus on the cross sans the cross.  Though I can understand why the Church had to burn Bruno.  The only way to get a Neapolitan to button it would be to burn them.  

8:54 PM CST: The presentation of the "cosmic calendar" was well done and true to the original while clearly much better graphically.  Now he is going to discuss human evolution.  So far this first episode has hit all the hot buttons.  The creation of our universe in the big bang, the birth of the sun and stars, and now human evolution.   As always the animation is great.  

8:59 PM CST: He shared his story of meeting Carl Sagan back in 1975. It was really touching.  What we have now is a very well done version of Cosmos.  This was 100% as good as the original cosmos.