Blogs / Bad Astronomy

So the doorbell rings. It’s the postman. He has a big box! What could it be?

Hmmmm. "Penguin Group Inc", it says. It’s heavy. Could it be…?

Why, yes, it could be. It’s a carton full of my books!

W00t!

Hot off the press, too. They’ve been shipping to books stores across this great land of ours, just in time for no one to be able to afford them. Oh well, people love to read about imminent destruction during a recession, right?

Right?

These ones are going to my contributors (advisors in the book) and family. 10 days to go before they’re available to the public. Better get them now, before they get eaten up.

Literally.

Just yesterday, the Cassini spacecraft passed an incredible 25 kilometers (16 miles) off the surface of Saturn’s weird moon Enceladus. This icy ball has plumes of water jetting up from its south pole region, emanating from a series of parallel cracks nicknamed tiger stripes. Cassini flew right through these plumes! The images taken have not been fully processed yet, but the Cassini folks have released a few of the raw images. Here’s one:

Wow. The surface of Enceladus is entirely covered with ice; see how few craters there are? That means the surface is "new"; if it were older there would be lots more craters. That means the moon is recently (or continuously) resurfaced, which in turn means a dynamic process almost certainly involving water and a liquid interior. The cracks and plates look to be due to ice floes. We see the same sort of thing here on Earth and on Jupiter’s frozen moon Europa.

This flyby was not designed to get great images, but to use other sensors to directly sample and investigate the composition of the plumes. Another flyby will happen on Halloween, October 31, and that one will focus — so to speak — on imaging. So stay tuned! There is a lot more coolness to come.

So a few months ago I stumbled on a series of critical thinking videos by superhero of skepticism Captain Disillusion. They’re funny, and extremely well done (the guy has video skillz), and I’ve been meaning to pimp them for a long time.

Then Skepchick Rebecca Watson drops the dime, saying he was at TAM 6! Arg! I missed him there!

He made a vid about it, and pokes fun at lots of people, including moi.

His other videos are more about the debunk-a-bunk, so go watch them and enjoy. They’re really cool.

Wanna see the coolest video set to music from a webcam attached to the very first privately owned company rocket that made it into orbit that you’ll see… well, ever?^*

Yes. Yes, you do.

Space X took the webcam video from their successful launch of the Falcon-1 rocket and set it to music. The result is made of awesome. The editing is a thing of wonder.

Hint: turn up your speakers.

And yes, you want the high-def version.

Now to go find me some Crystal Method disks…

Tip o’ the heat shield to my anonymous mole at Space X.

This is the same phrase I used to submit this to Fark, and it got greenlit! W00t!

Well, nuts. I totally forgot to mention that I’ll be interviewed on the radio show The Inner Side tonight at around 10:30 Central (US) time. They stream the show live, so go to the KPFT website and click the "Listen Live" picture in the upper right.

We’ll be dissing McCain over his dumb "overhead projector" nonsense.

Oh– I hear he’ll have some sort of biologist on before me. But I’ve never heard of him.

Kirbuk: So what else do they do in Kentucky?
Floyd: Let’s see. They have a big, big horse race, play very good basketball, have babies like everywhere else.
Kirbuk: Sounds like a nice place.
Floyd: Never been there.

They also, it turns out, host the Carnival of Space.

And their grass is blue! Weird.

Next year marks the International Year of Astronomy, celebrating the 400th anniversary of Galileo turning his telescope to the sky and revolutionizing the way we think of the Universe, and our place in it.

There are many things IYA is doing to celebrate, but one of my favorites is the 365 Days of Astronomy effort. Starting January 1, this site will feature one podcast about astronomy per day for the whole year. I’m excited for lots of reasons, not the least of which is the people involved: Pamela Gay, Fraser Cain, Michael Koppelman, and, why, I might even drop in a ‘cast or two.

And this means you too! We want people to contribute, including making your own podcast and submitting it. That’s right; you can contribute your own voice to the choir in an international effort to teach people about the wonders of the sky. Don’t just leave all the heavy lifting to us, folks: take a turn at it. Who knows? You might just like it, too.

Join us.