Blogs / Bad Astronomy

1) Having furniture again.

2) Internet access at home. (I can write blog entries from home again!)

3) Getting cable TV again (I missed Futurama!).

4) Eating chicken soup with matzoh balls and a big spinach salad instead of McDonalds, pizza, and Texmex for the tenth time.

5) Access to my own coffeemaker.

Sometimes you need the luxuries taken away to appreciate them. It’s been a tough week, but I’m back. I’ll have more astronomy stuff to say soon.

Phew!

Sometimes, clouds make an observing session better.

Holy Haleakala! Click the image for a bigger version, and read about what’s going on with it on the SpaceWeather site.

Speaking of this, I sat through a tremendous lightning storm here in Boulder yesterday. I had almost forgotten what they’re like; in California where I lived lightning is very rare. I suspect it’s because clouds in that area don’t build up vast convection currents. The wind comes from over the ocean, and sweeps in over the land. I was less than 100 km from the coast, so the rain was always pretty mild. We’d get some downpours, but I think maybe only four or five thunderstorms in the six years I lived there. I grew up on the east coast, so I know thunderstorms! It’s nice to be back in a place where the weather gets dramatic again.

Oh — While driving in to the coffeehouse to write this entry, I’m almost positive I saw a bald eagle flying around about 10 km from my house. Wow.

Tip o’ the dew shield to Larry Klaes, and Spaceweather.com.

What is it about grand design spiral galaxies? Is it their symmetry, their grace, the sweeping majesty of the spiral arms?

Beats me. But they sure are pretty!

The image above is a new release from Hubble, and shows the lovely M81, a spiral galaxy just 12 million light years away. That’s close, as cosmic neighborhoods go; only a handful of big galaxies are closer. This means that M81 is pretty well studied, and Hubble images can be very detailed. In fact, in this observation, individual stars in M81 can be seen! Click it to get higher-res version, including, if you dare, a 23,000 x 15,000 pixel version that tips the scale at 700 Mb!

M81 is interesting. Despite its beautiful symmetry, it had a close encounter with another, somewhat smaller galaxy named M82 about 300 million years ago. They are still fairly close together:

They are about a degree apart, and easily spotted together by northern hemisphere observers using binoculars — some sharp-eyed folks can even see them with their unaided eyes, in fact. If you look at M82 (click it for a bigger image) you can see that it’s a mess. When galaxies pass each other, clouds of gas and dust can be disturbed or collide, which then triggers star formation. M82 is called a “starburst galaxy” because of the vast number of stars being born in it. The weird reddish tendrils are actually gas streamers being blown out by the most massive and luminous of the newly formed stars in the galaxy.

M81 holds a special place for me, too. Back in 1993, a star in the galaxy blew up, and it was named SN1993j (the 10th supernova seen that year). I was in grad school, and we took some students out to the 1-meter ’scope to take a look. I had looked up what the core of the galaxy looked like so I’d be familiar with it when I saw it. Near the core are two bright stars — actually stars in our Galaxy — seen superposed on the more distant spiral. But when I looked through the eyepiece, I saw a third star, about equal in brightness, and I knew right away it was the supernova.

I can still remember the awe I felt, the thrill, hunched over the eyepiece of the telescope. I had spent two weeks up in that same dome getting my Masters degree observations, but that was using a CCD, an electronic detector which saved images directly to a hard drive. This was different. I was seeing the supernova directly, myself. The photons I was seeing left that galaxy 12 million years previously, traveled across intergalactic space, were reflected by a mirror, and sent shooting into my own eye. Somehow, those packets of energy — so weak individually that they couldn’t ruffle a mosquito’s wing — were then converted into electric impulses by my eye and brain, and transformed once again into the sense of the numinous.

When those photons left that galaxy, there were no beings on Earth capable of understanding them. But during the intervening eons, our brains and eyes evolved, our imagination grew, and we became a species that can not only look up and wonder, but collect the feeble information that had previously fallen unheeded onto the ground and turn it into understanding.

Maybe that’s not what everyone sees when they look at the image of M81, but it’s what I see. And maybe, now, when you look at it, you can get a taste of it too.

We made it!

The Bad family is in Boulder. Our house is empty, and the truck with our furniture won’t get here until Thursday. That means I won’t have internet at home until Friday, so until then I get to do the yuppie wireless-at-the-local-coffeeshop thing.

First, let me thank everyone for the well wishes on the previous post. I really appreciate it. I’ve entered a weird meta-stage of blogging now where I get emails about the comments on my posts. My mom thinks you are all very cool.

Second, let me say that the drive between California and Colorado is incredibly beautiful. The things we saw! For example, in Nevada, we saw over a dozen dust devils. One we saw from over 15 miles away, and when we got closer we thought we saw a fire next to it. It turns out the "fire" was a second, far larger devil:

The scale of this was amazing; it was at least 100 meters across at the base. Here’s a close-up:

Please excuse the foreground fuzzies; northern Nevada has its fair share of bugs, and at 75 mph a car’s windshield imparts quite a bit of kinetic energy to the typical exoskeleton.

Then we went through Utah, and up into Wyoming:

I can’t imagine why geologists and archaeologists love Wyoming so much.

Then, we saw a good sign:

And then, finally:

Home.

I will post this without comment.

OK, I lied. I have one comment.

I so know what I’m gonna show in my talk at the next TAM.

Tip o’ the lint trap to Beleth from the JREF chat room Skeptics Rock.

This very cool image shows you all the objects in the solar system bigger than 200 miles in diameter. Well, it doesn’t include the solar corona, or Jupiter’s magnetosphere, but it does include planets, asteroids, moons, and one star. Very nifty. And yeah, this has been around a while, but I’m sitting in my empty house (the furniture has all been moved out and is on its way to Colorado), I was up late last night packing, up early this morning finishing packing, and we just got back from the Little Astronomer performing in her school play ("Mary Poppins", for those taking notes, and she was great). So, my point is: I’m tired, and went through my old blog entry drafts looking for something easy.
Tip o’ the lens cap to ToSeek.