I never get tired of the stunning pictures being sent to Earth from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. This one is particularly cool:
It’s a little weird, isn’t it? What you’re seeing is sunset over some mountains on the Moon, with only the peaks popping up into the sunlight. It might help to pull back a bit:
[Click to embiggen.]
That’s a little better. You can see the long shadows of the two mountains on the hills farther back, giving the image a bit of context and relief.
The Australian Vaccination Network, an antivax organization fronted by Meryl Dorey, has long been an antiscience group devoted to spreading any kind of nonsensical rhetoric they can. The good news? Now they’re being called out on it.
As The Sceptic’s Book of Poo-Poo extensively documents, the media used to be pretty easy on the AVN, but now are routinely pointing out that they are antivax, and one has even highlighted some of Dorey’s outrageous and fallacious claims. This all comes on the heels of the New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission concluding that the AVN is in fact and in deed antivax, and needs to have disclaimers on their site — a finding Dorey has ignored.
The AVN has been the loudest of the antivaxxers in Australia, a country that has seen a rise in many preventable diseases, including pertussis, which has claimed the lives of several infants. Read the rest of this entry »
As I wrote about recently, I have teamed up with Skepchick Surly Amy to raise money for the American Cancer Society: she has created 200 lovely hand-made ceramic Bad Astronomy pendant necklaces, and for each one she sells for $20 she’s donating $10 to the ACS. Each one is different, so check them all out!
Over half the necklaces have been sold, but there are still quite a few left. Hurry and buy one (or more) soon; the total raised will be announced at the star party at Dragon*Con this year, September 2!
Find out more at Amy’s Skepchick post, which has more pictures, including one cute one of how one necklace is keeping a couple together, despite their reading material.
I just found out that video of my talk at w00tstock has been posted on YouTube. The quality is a little shaky, since it was a handheld video taken from a distance back, so some of the pictures may be hard to discern, but I think it suffices to get the point across.
This may surprise you, but the content is pretty much Not Safe For Work. Yeah, I know: I’m not generally known for that. But hey– it’s an astronomy talk! What better place to go a little blue?
The video is in two parts; the first has the last couple of minutes of the warmup before my talk (I came on after the intermission), and the second part includes the premier of the trailer for my new TV show. The reaction of the audience was… well. It made me happy indeed.
I was a big Green Lantern fan when I was a kid. It may have been my favorite comic book, and I used to sneak into my brother’s room and read every issue he got.
I’m a grownup now, more or less, but sometimes those comic book heroes still get to me. At Comic Con last week, this wonderful thing happened when a young lad asked Ryan Reynolds — who will play Hal Jordan in the upcoming movie – about the Green Lantern oath:
I still know that oath by memory. And you know what? In general, it’s a pretty good motto for life, too.
Graphing variables is a critical skill in science. If something depends on something else — like the speed of sounds depends on air density, or the surface gravity of an object depends on its size — then if you plot the two things on a graph, you should see a pattern. The result is a line, or a curve. If the two things don’t depend on each other, you get a random collection of dots: a scatter plot.
About a hundred years ago, two astronomers plotted the brightness of stars against their color (from blue to red) and what they found was amazing: a clear connection between the two! In fact, stars fell into several groups, and over the years we’ve learned about why that happens. Most stars are stable, like the Sun, and fall into the Main Sequence of the plot. Some are old, some young, some dying, some dead. And they all have their place in what we now call the Hertzsprung-Russel diagram, or H-R diagram for short. It’s one of the most useful tools astronomers have ever created.
And now my friend Stuart who runs Astronomy Blog has done it one better: he’s created an H-R diagram of media stars. It’s awesome:
That’s really funny, and I wish I had thought of it. The vertical axis is fame, as denoted by Google results, and the horizontal axis is peer-reviewed papers. I’m actually only first author on I think two papers, but I was listed as author on a lot due to my work on Hubble. So I do OK on this diagram. I note that Brian Cox is more luminous than me, but then, he’s an actual rock star. If there were a branch for white main sequence stars, he and I would be in a dead heat.
Next up, I hope: a space-time diagram showing warping due to massive astronomers.
[I know I already posted this, but the video of the trailer had to be taken down, fixed, and put back up, so I'm reposting to give everyone a chance to actually watch it. Everything works now. Yay! Also, it's up on reddit (actually twice) and Fark, too.]
Finally, at last, after many months, I can now officially reveal the Sooper Sekrit Project that has kept me so busy over all this time. I think you’re gonna like this… so why not just jump right in to the teaser trailer posted online by a small TV network you may have heard of called THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL!
[evil laugh]
How ’bout that?
I’ve been working with the Discovery Channel on hosting a new TV science show called "Phil Plait’s Bad Universe". It’s a three-part program where I dissect issues in astronomy and science, putting claims to the test. There’s no air date yet, but I’m hoping it’ll be on your TV sets this fall. Read the rest of this entry »
If you went to BadAstronomy.com and found yourself here, never fear: the BA Blog has moved to its new home at Discover Blogs. The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking and all that) is still online, too.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and loves fighting misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
Bad Astronomy is a Wikio Top Blog! Clearly, Wikio has excellent taste.
"If things worked the way I wanted them to, any reporter about to do another 'sensational' story on deadly meteors would consult this volume, and bang! common sense would find its way into the news. How strange would that world be?" -- Adam Savage, Mythbusters
"Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan. Frightening, but oddly exhilarating." -- Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising
