Because I was on the road Wednesday night, I missed the first few hours of reaction to Newt Gingrich’s speech in Florida, when he said he wants to have a permanent station on the Moon "by the end of my second term". It wasn’t until Thursday morning that I opened up my web browser and saw that every blog, every news site, everyone, was talking about it. I must have had dozens of tweets and emails telling me about it and asking my opinion.

So I found a video of the speech and watched it. The only reason I didn’t laugh out loud at the nonsense unfolding from Mr. Gingrich’s mouth was that I already had seen the reaction online.

In Discover Magazine’s Crux blog I wrote a dissection of his speech and why he’s so vastly and profoundly wrong: The Newt-onian Mechanics of Building a Permanent Moon Base. You’ll get all the details there of why I think Gingrich’s plan is the worst possible way to go about trying to go to the Moon: in a hurry, with the wrong source of funding, and maybe because there’s a threat from those dirty communists.

Don’t get me wrong: I want a Moon base. I’ve written about that many times here on the blog, and for my Geek-A-Week card I asked Len Peralta to draw me as Commander Koenig from "Space:1999", for criminy’s sake. I stand second to no one in advocating exploring space, and our own satellite in particular. But it has to be done right, and Gingrich’s plan would be the worst way to do it.

In the post for The Crux I was blunt, but held back my tongue a bit because that isn’t necessarily the venue for me to do otherwise. But here, on my blog, I’ll say this: Gingrich’s words were both transparent and hollow. I knew right away what he was claiming was simply not possible, either financially, technologically, or politically. Take your pick. And it was also clear to me that no matter how you slice it, NASA would get screwed royally if his Moon base plan were implemented, since it would mean billions of dollars moved away from NASA projects to finance this. I started digging deeper to see if my first reaction was wrong, and all I found showed I was righter than I first thought. Every way you try to do it, his plan would destroy NASA. And I’m not exaggerating; the amount of money we’re talking about taking away from NASA projects to fund a base his way would leave everything else in NASA facing cancellation. It’s really that simple.

I was actually pretty stunned that people in Florida would support this idea. Obviously, they would have a vested interest in hearing big ideas about space exploration, but with just a little thought it’s clear that while Gingrich’s idea may be big, it’s only because it’s been stretched out way larger than it can handle. Its density is zero.

On the surface, it seems like Gingrich is a friend of space and science, but don’t be fooled: he’s just as likely to pander to the antiscience base as any other candidate, and his history shows he will attack science when he gets the chance. So while you might be inclined to like the idea of a candidate talking about promoting space exploration under any circumstances, have a care. Because once you get beneath that surface, you might find there’s nothing there.

Image credit: Gage Skidmore, caption added by me.

If you live nearly anywhere on Earth — those of you north of 73° you’re out of luck, but I’m guessing there aren’t many of you! — and look to the southeast shortly after sunset, you’ll see the figure of Orion. Follow the three belt stars to the east, and you’ll see a bright star: Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. If it’s near the horizon, you may see it twinkling madly: flickering, dancing, perhaps even changing color.

This gave astronomer David Lynch an idea: take a time exposure of Sirius with a camera and telephoto, and purposely wiggle the mount. He tried it on January 4, 2012, and the result he got is actually quite lovely:

Isn’t that cool? As the vibrating camera caused the star to trail around, the changing colors got recorded along the track. The changing brightness of Sirius can be seen as well, as parts of the loop-de-loop fade and intensify.

The reason stars twinkle is because of our atmosphere: little blobs of air are constantly in motion. These air parcels act like lenses, and as light passes through them, the path of the ray gets bent a little bit. That’s what causes the dancing motion, the actual twinkling. Different colors get bent by different amounts (which is why prisms break up white light into separate colors).

While it’s beautiful to our eyes, twinkling is a major pain to astronomers. It blurs our images! That’s why we launch telescopes into space, or design fancy optics for ground-based telescopes to remove it. Twinkling is free, but correcting it sure ain’t.

Lynch has several websites loaded with interesting pictures he’s taken of nature, including Thule Scientific, Color and Light in Nature, and San Andreas Fault.

Image credit: David Lynch (used by permssion). Tip o’ the Snell’s Law to Earth Science Picture of the Day.

Yesterday was the weekly live video Space Roundup, run by Fraser Cain from Universe Today. This week we had Pamela Gay, Alan Boyle, Nicole Gugliucci, and Ian O’Neill. We talked about the solar storm, black holes, arsenic life, Newt Gingrich, Phobos-Grunt, and answered some questions from the listeners. Here’s the video:

We do these every week on Google+ at 18:00 UTC on Thursday. Come join us!

I have nothing to add to this, except to say it’s great, and I saw it because Brian Cox mentioned it on Twitter.

Oh yeah: one more thing; watch it in HD and full screen. Coooool.

In 2007, the European Space Agency probe passed by Mars on its way to visit a comet. It used Mars for a gravity assist to help it on its way, and got close enough to take some very detailed pictures (it also passed by the asteroid Lutetia and returned amazing shots; see the gallery at the bottom of this post). That data wasn’t initially released by the mission leader (that’s fairly common in some missions), but they were finally made available late last year. My pal Emily Lakdawalla from the Planetary Society Blog grabbed a bunch of them and put together some simply amazing pictures from them, including this jaw-dropper:

Yeah. You really want to click that to Barsoomenate it. Holy dry ice polar caps!

In fact, you should go over to her blog where she gives all the details and has more incredibly cool pictures of the Red Planet as well. I don’t want to spoil her fun by giving it all away here. Go!

Credit: ESA / MPS / UPD / LAM / IAA / RSSD / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA / processed by Emily Lakdawalla

- Rosetta’s cometary goal now in sight
- Lutetia may have witnessed the birth of the Earth
- Curiosity on its way to Mars!

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The solar storm that impacted Earth Tuesday produced a lot of auroral activity, though it’s hard to say if it was really that much stronger than usual. Still, any aurora is better than none… and I have two videos to show you!

The first was taken on January 22, and shows the effects of an earlier wave of subatomic particles spat out by the Sun. It was made in Birtavarre, Norway by Ørjan Bertelsen, who put together 1600 exposures to make it:

It’s amazing to get the three-dimensional effect as the sheets of glowing atmospheric molecules pass overhead, and you’re seeing them nearly edge-on. And I love picking out familiar constellations in videos like that; did you see Leo, Gemini, Cancer, and Taurus?

The second video was shot in Abisko National Park, Sweden, by Chad Blakley, and all I can think of as I watch it is how cold those people must have been!

As I mentioned in a radio interview on Tuesday, I’ve never seen a bright aurora. Once in Maryland I saw a reddish glow to the extreme north during a particularly big display, but that’s really about it. Someday, though, I’ll get a chance. As the Sun gets more active over the next two years I may very well finally see these magnificent light shows. After writing about them so much, I think I’ve earned it.

Tip o’ the parka hood to John Markus Bjørndalen.

It’s a truism that whenever I write about the solid fact that the Earth is warming up, that post will get comments that make it clear that denialists — and please read that link before commenting on my use of the word — are like religious zealots, writing the same tired long-debunked arguments that are usually debunked in the very post they’re commenting on.

Still, we press on. The noise machine only wins if they can outshout reality, so it’s important to keep writing about it. Here are five news items about climate change that might help mitigate the nonsense.

1) Last week, I posted the results from studies showing 2011 was the 9th hottest year on record. Forbes online has more information on this. They take a different tack on it, but get the same results I do: the Earth is warming up, and humans are why.

2) Some very welcome news: the National Center for Science Education — who for years have been at the forefront of battling creationists getting their "curriculum" into schools — is adding climate change to their syllabus. At that link they have well-written descriptions of the problem, how to teach about climate change, and how take action against denialism.

You can watch NCSE’s Executive Director, the wonderful Genie Scott (full disclosure: she’s a friend of mine) talk about climate change, and why it’s so important that we tackle this issue politically.

3) One tactic of denialists like Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and several Congressmen is to use witch hunts against climate scientists. By filing court orders to get access to emails, for example, they endlessly hound scientists. This serves their purposes quite well: it sets up a chilling effect, for one, making a hostile environment for the scientist; and it sets up doubt in the public’s mind despite there being zero real evidence for it. Michael Mann has suffered this sort of thing many times, despite being cleared of all wrongdoing over and over again.

Now the tables are turned. Scientists have filed a Freedom of Information request to find out who is bankrolling the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a denialist "think tank" with "shadowy funders". In the US, there are groups like this aplenty, and in many cases their funding can be traced to oil companies, the Koch brothers, and so on.

The more people see who actually funds these denialist groups, the better. Once it became public that it was the tobacco industry pumping so many lies into the media about cigarettes the tide turned, and these global warming denialist groups are literally using the same tactics. And hey, the Heartland Institute, which bills itself as libertarian, also has ties to tobacco at the same time it funds New Zealand climate denial groups, too.

4) Apropos of that, some good news in the fight: the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund — which helps raise money for beleagured scientists under attack by denialists — has a new home: Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). PEER will provide sponsorship and logistical support for the fund. Money raised goes to help defray the costs of legal fees for scientists who are the subjects of the above-mentioned witch hunts. The CSLDF also helps educate scientists about their rights, recruits lawyers to help out, and serves as an information database related to legal actions against scientists.

Wanna help? Donate to the fund here.

5) … and apropos of that, it’s nice to see scientists fighting back, too.