Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Will it ever end?

I wonder. How much of this do we have to take before people get the picture?

The above report is interesting, as it does sow some confusion over what’s going on. Unfortunately, I didn’t see anything on Nature’s website. If anyone finds out more, please post the info in the comments!

What’s this?

If you said "Jupiter", then give yourself a pat on the back. But if you said "That’s just Jupiter" then kick yourself in the butt.

That ain’t just Jupiter. That’s Jupiter as seen from the New Horizons spacecraft, screaming past it at 75,000 kph and from a distance of nearly 300 million kilometers. That’s cool.

What’s cooler is that the camera on the probe is designed to look at Pluto, which is pretty faint. Jupiter is many things, but faint it ain’t (hey, I got to use that word twice in one blog entry). So this picture was snapped with an exposure time of just 6 milliseconds. 0.006 seconds.

That’s cool too.

This image isn’t any better than what you can do from terra firma with decent equipment, but New Horizons is still a ways off from Jupiter. For a final touch of cool, New Horizons is going to use Jupiter to accelerate and change its orbit, getting it to Pluto much faster than otherwise. The close encounter of the jovian kind will happen on February 28, 2007. I expect we’ll be getting some more amazing pictures by then, too.

Oh– the black spots on Jupiter are not evidence that NASA is turning Jupiter into a star. They are shadows of the moons Europa (left) and Io (right) on the cloud tops. The moons are just visible there too.

Over at The Planetary Society Blog, guest blogger David Seal (filling in for Emily Lakdawalla who just had a baby) has written a really good article about radar observations of Earth made from the Space Shuttle.

Normally that’s not my cup of tea, but David has a great and personable writing style that makes the topic fun, interesting, and yes, inspiring. He writes very convincingly about why we do science from space, and how it has an impact on us… in many ways, including mapping volcanic events, assessing the damage from the 2004 tsunami, seeing how the flooding affected New Orleans, and much more.

The coolest thing he wrote about, IMO, was about mapping the K/T impact crater in Chixchulub, Mexico. That’s the one that gave the dinosaurs a Really Bad Day. Here’s a radar image he mentions:

That arc in the lower right is part of the rim of the crater. It’s basically impossible to see from the ground, and invisible even from space using most normal methods of observation. But the very sensitive radar mapping technique reveals it clearly. Arguments have raged about how big the impact event was, spawned by uncertainty in the crater size. Was the asteroid big enough to wipe out the dinosaurs all by its lonesome, or was it not quite enough to do that, and instead just the start of a series of events that killed them all off? These sorts of questions — and face it, they are pretty important ones! — can be solved or at least helped along by observations like the ones David writes about in the blog.

He makes a pretty good case for science, and science from space. The next time someone asks you why we’re "wasting money" on space, you can send ‘em to that blog entry.

Since I’m on a kick lately of cool images and such…

A while back, I blogged about a site with great panoramas of the Moon.

Silly me, I should have mentioned Mike Constantine’s Moon Pans website. If you have Quicktime installed, you can sweep back and forth on images, going around 360 degrees. It’s not precisely like being there (you can, for example, do this feat in your underwear which is not recommended on the lunar surface), but it’s still pretty cool.

I was surfing around when I came across this ad:

I know what the middle one stands for, but I wonder what the Angry Astronomer would say? And does either of us have an MBA?

I have a (cough cough) BS in astronomy, and an MA and PhD as well. So no business degree, or sense for that matter. My head’s always in the clouds. Or higher, if possible.

Just a reminder– I will be giving my general Bad Astronomy talk (standing eggs on end and making fun of Hollywood movies) tonight for the Bay Area Skeptics in Oakland, California at 6:30. Check out the BAS website for details.

I love creative people. They do things that surprise us, and that’s one of many things that makes like worth living…

I’ve seen probably two dozen lunar eclipses. They’re pretty, but they’re slow. It takes a while to notice the shadow of the Earth slowly creeping across the lunar face. This makes it hard for me to get really excited about them. I enjoy them, of course, but it’s also hard to sustain a high level of excitement when you keep going back inside and outside every 15 minutes to watch the eclipse’s glacial progress.

But then I saw this image, and all was forgiven:

Man, that’s brilliant. I’ll never see another lunar eclipse the same way.

And that image is one of many at Laurent Laveder’s Photoastronomique site. Like Thierry Legault (as I previously blogged), he is a true artist, and a very clever one at that. Check out the rest of his eclipse images. He has a fantastic way to visualize the Earth’s shadow on the sky. His stuff is so cool!

I love creative people.

Hat tip to good ol’ APOD, and to Laurent for giving me permission to use his wonderful picture.