Science Getaways is a company my wife and I started so that science enthusiasts (and you better face it, since you’re reading this, that’s you) can go on a vacation that has extra science added. For me, science isn’t a career or a hobby — it’s a lifestyle. I can’t get enough, even on vacation, so we figured why not put together vacation deals that have bonus value-added science?

The first Getaway is September 16 – 20 of this year, and it’ll be at the C Lazy U ranch, an all-inclusive luxury ranch in the Rocky Mountains. We visited there last year and it’s incredibly beautiful. The views are spectacular, and you’re really out in the middle of nature there.

Which brings up a funny coincidence. This morning I was going through some photos I took, and stumbled on one I took last year when I was up in Rocky Mountain National Park filming a science documentary. When we finished shooting we packed up the gear and headed down the path to the van. As we made that long walk, I looked over to my right and was pretty surprised to see this:

About two dozen elk were just standing or sitting around, casually watching us and other hikers as we stumbled down the path! It was astonishing; they were very calm and satisfied to just watch us walk by, although the male — that’s him with the antlers — was eyeballing us to make sure we didn’t get too close to his harem. He didn’t have to worry. I was too busy trying not to kill myself carrying the big camera tripod over my shoulder; wandering off the path to get a closer look at his wives wasn’t really on my mind.

As I looked at the picture of the elk I started thinking about seeing more of them now that the weather is warmer and we start weekend hiking in the Rockies again. That’s when I thought about Science Getaways — the ranch hands told us that in late summer it’s common for herds of elk to walk across the ranch grounds. Elk are big — like horse-sized deer — so that must be quite a sight (check out these photos of elk at the ranch in the winter). And that’s not all we’re likely to see; there are mule deer, pronghorn deer, eagles, and more — maybe even moose. Biologist Dave Armstrong will be with us to point all that out and tell us about what we’re experiencing, too.

I’m really looking forward to the nature hikes. That area of the Rockies is surpassingly beautiful (you don’t have to take my word for it; here’s a family who wrote up their experiences at the ranch). Of course, once the Sun goes down, the reins of science will be passed from biology to astronomy. I think of all the things about this, that’s what I’m most excited about: clear, dark, crisp skies, and unfettered access to telescopes! I’m bringing my Celestron 8", and there will be other ‘scopes there too. The views will be amazing, whether you’re looking out over the mountains, or up over the mountains!

If you’re interested, take a look at the site we’ve set up for Science Getaways. Also, my friend Maria at Skepchick interviewed me about this, too. If you have questions please drop us a line!

Every now and again my work piles up and I can feel that edge of panic start to set in.

Then I saw a video and my brain let out a nice long sigh (brains are remarkable that way): Alberta Aurora – Prairie Light, a lovely time lapse that has better-than-usual resolution and color, taken as the April 23/24 solar storm swept over the Earth.

What you see in an aurora depends in part on the angle of the Earth’s magnetic field relative to the air; the geomagnetic field guides particles from the Sun’s outbursts into our atmosphere. If you are seeing this from far enough away, you get those sheets and ribbons, the interaction seen from the side. But at 1:50 into the video the perspective changes. The camera is underneath the point where the particles are streaming in, so you’re looking up, right into the barrel of the magnetic field. It’s a remarkable change in view that must be awesome to see in person.

I’ve never seen a full-on aurora, but some day I will. I hope it’s as pretty as this one was.

Every now again I get surprised by a photo, showing me something I didn’t know about. And I love it even more when that surprise is from an object I thought I knew!

So check out this incredible image of the nearby galaxy Centaurus A, a nearby galaxy harboring a whole slew of surprises:

[Click to galactinate, or get the 4000 x 4000 pixel version, or, if you're feeling frisky, cram this onto your hard drive: an image that's 8500 x 8400 pixels and 29 Mb in size! And trust me: you want to.]

Isn’t that stunning? This picture was taken by the MPG/ESO 2.2 meter telescope in Chile, and once you get over its beauty you’ll realize this galaxy is, frankly, seriously messed up.

Cen A is about 12 million light years away and has roughly the same mass as our Milky Way, containing a few hundred billion stars. The underlying glow of those stars is what makes that round background fuzz in the image, and takes on the familiar elliptical shape of many such galaxies. [Note: All the individual stars you see here are in our on galaxy, since we're inside the Milky Way looking out to Cen A. Also, the little circles next to bright stars are reflections inside the camera itself, and aren't real.]

But check out that wide swath of dark stuff across the middle! That blocks the light from stars behind it, so it’s a cold certainty that’s a dust lane: a thick, flat disk of complex molecules commonly seen in galaxies. But… it’s commonly seen in spiral galaxies like ours, not elliptical ones like Cen A. So something’s weird right off the bat. And note how the ends of the disk seem bent in opposite directions; on the right it’s bent down, and on the left it’s bent up.

Most likely, this is because Cen A ate another galaxy. Literally: a galaxy collided with it in the recent past — well, like in the past few dozen million years — and that galaxy was probably more like our own, rich with dust. As it was absorbed, the dust was stripped from it and settled into that disk. The warping at the ends is a gravitational effect, most likely a distortion from the collision itself. We see it in other galaxies that have nearby companions.

When you observe Cen A using a radio telescope it gets weirder: two huge jets of material are being shot out of the core. The image here shows those jets (click to embiggen). Cen A is a very strong emitter of radio waves; in fact that’s why it’s called Cen A: the brightest radio source in the constellation of Centaurus.

The source of those jets is a gigantic black hole in the core of the galaxy. Read the rest of this entry »

I do a roughly monthly segment with astronomer Seth Shostak on Big Picture Science, a radio show/podcast done by The SETI Institute. This month, Seth and I talked about the American Airlines dustup when they were planning to run an interview with reality-impaired antivaxxer Meryl Dorey. This story is a great victory for reality, and I’ve already written about the back story.

Never forget: this antivax issue is more than important: it is literally life and death. Because of lowering vaccine rates, pertussis outbreaks are so prevalent health officials in the state of Washington have declared it to be an epidemic. The governor has had to dip into emergency funds to the tune of $90,000 to finance an information campaign to get the word out.

But the money is secondary to the idea that babies and people with immune deficiencies are at risk of dying from a disease that is essentially totally preventable if everyone got their vaccinations and boosters.

I cannot state that any more simply. The antivax crowd says vaccines cause autism, vaccines cause neurological problems, vaccines hurt your immune system. None of that is true. The real danger is when people believe the antivax propaganda. Infants too young to be vaccinated themselves rely on herd immunity — if enough people are vaccinated the disease has no place to live. And when we as a community don’t vaccinate, people get sick, and some people — including those infants, usually just a few weeks old — die.

Talk to your board-certified doctor, and if they say it’s OK, get vaccinated. You may save more than one life doing so.

I worked with Hubble Space Telescope data for about ten years, and one of the most amazing things about that was seeing the images fresh off the mirror. Knowing that no human on Earth had ever seen that particular object that sharply was a thrill.

Not every Hubble observation gets turned into a gorgeous image, though. A lot of them don’t need to be for scientific publications, for one thing, and for another not every observation is of a targeted object for a specific purpose. Because of that, there are probably hundreds and hundreds of amazing objects — galaxies, nebulae, star clusters — buried in the data, waiting to be found.

That’s where you come in: the folks at the European Space Agency’s Hubble HQ are holding a contest they call Hidden Treasures. You can look through the Hubble observation archive for images and tweak them using online tools they provide, or you can really roll up your sleeves and use professional astronomical software to prettify the images. They’ve made a video explaining the Hubble archive, which may help.

The contest has nice prizes (an iPod Touch, an iPad, and other "goodies"), but you have to hurry: it ends May 31. I know, I’m late to the game here, and I apologize. But if this sounds like something you’d like to do, go dive in! I can tell you as someone with (a lot) of first-hand experience here: it’s huge fun. And who knows? You might find something beautiful, something interesting, or even something no one has ever seen before.

A little while back, I was at Utah State University to give a public talk about the threat from asteroid impacts and what we can do to stop them (PLUG ALERT: if you want me to come talk at your venue, my agent would love to hear from you).

While I was there I was interviewed by Utah Public Radio, and that interview is online.

I was also chatted up by the local TV station, KSL. I think it went OK, and they put it online as well:

[You may have to refresh this page to get the video to load.]

While I rather wish I had stated succinctly that even the basis of the "Mayan 2012 doomsday" nonsense is itself a gross misinterpretation of Mayan history, culture, and calendar, I think I was pretty clear. I have to walk a fine line sometimes: debunking crap doomsday scenarios like 2012 while also warning of real dangers like asteroid impacts… while neither over- or understating that danger. It’s a delicate balance.

A balance, I’ll note, which is apparently completely lost on some of the commenters on the KSL website who are saying I’m totally wrong and that the doomsday is coming in December [Note: I checked just before posting this, and most of the really over-the-top comments have been deleted, and I thank the forum moderators for that]. The sheer blind eye some have toward reality is stunning.

I know some people have deep beliefs they hold true, and are willing to deny what’s right in front of their face if they have to. I also know it’s the Internet out there, where people don’t read past the first line or watch a video past the first few seconds. Still, the denial and — to be blunt — dickery is breathtaking. One person actually said they hoped the Universe kills me so they don’t have to listen to my "drivel" [that was one of the comments deleted, BTW].

Of course this isn’t the first time I’ve had someone wish me dead, or that I’d shut up. Duh. But what I find fascinating is the irony. One complaint I hear about critical thinking is that it takes away hope, takes away beauty, and replaces them with despair and the ugly nature of reality. And yet here we see people shredding their critical thinking to hold fast to a doomsday scenario that is as ugly as it is hopeless.

If they actually applied a bit of skepticism, they’d see the 2012 doomsday garbage for what it is. But they cleave unto it as fervently as a drowning man to a life preserver.

I don’t think I have anything particularly profound to add to this; I’m just shining a light on it for you to see. Be aware of this, and always remember people’s ability to be paradoxical and completely embrace a nonsensical danger while denying the real one.

When I’m getting the mid-afternoon drowsies, and looking for a comfortable, warm, cozy place to take a nap, what could possibly be better than… the impact crater-scarred surface of the Moon?

This may be the greatest blanket throw in the history of blankets. Who wouldn’t want to cuddle up in a little regolith?

And ZOMFSM and it comes with matching pillows! And there’s a floor cushion!

Supermoon, indeed.

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to Design for Mankind via Jeri Ryan on Pinterest.