Billie Piper (mmmmm, Rose) was recently interviewed by the BBC and talked about Rose. Why would she do that now? If you don’t know, then I suggest clicking away to some site somewhere where they’ve never heard of Doctor Who.

She uses enough British slang in the interview that I’m not exactly sure what she means all the time. I guess I wasn’t in England long enough to learn the language. Cheeky monkey.

I’m traveling to St. Louis for a meeting (if you’re in the area, come to our blogger meetup!). But, in the tradition of the web, today is Caturday, a day when you can legitimately blog about your cat.

So why not take the chance to welcome everyone to my newest — sorta — family member, Dinger?

The reason I say "sorta" is because my wife and I got her when she was a kitten quite some time ago, before The Little Astronomer was even born (I have a picture of Dinger peering curiously into my daughter bassinet). We had her for several years, but when we moved to California we decided she might enjoy life on my in-laws farm more, so we gave her to them. She stayed with them for about four years, but now they are moving to Colorado (just a couple of towns over, in fact), so we took her back.

She’s 14. Fourteen. So she’s the newest member of the fam, but in subjective years she’s like 128. She mostly sits around and sleeps, purrs, and growls when Canis Major or Canis Minor get too close (C. Minor is terrified of her, actually). She still hasn’t gotten tooth and claw with our other cat, whom I will simply call Lynx, keeping with the astronomical pseudonyms (though getting her real name isn’t all that hard to do).

Which reminds me: Dinger is in fact the new cat’s real name. It’s short for Schrödinger.

Feel free to LOL her.

Sigh.

Jeff Peckman stood before the citizens of Denver and showed the video. What it had on it we don’t know, because he would only allow certain members of the press to see it, and no video of his video was allowed to be taken. Evidently, Peckman is part of the Bush Administration.

Anyway, his video was supposed to show an alien looking in a bedroom window. He said it would have cost thousands of dollars and take a Hollywood studio to fake it. However, members of the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Society were able to create a fake video in a few hours and for under $100, which looks "slightly more animated" than the real thing. That’s according to someone who saw both, writing for the Rocky Mountain News (link above).

The fake video is all over YouTube already, and of course some people are claiming it’s the real thing. It’s not. Below are stills from the real footage and the hoaxed one (well the admitted hoax). The one on the left is from Peckman’s footage (posted on the Rocky Mountain News site), the one on the right is the claimed hoax.

The differences are obvious — most notably the shape of the head, and the mullions (crossbars) in the window. Now go to YouTube and watch the footage people are claiming is the real thing.

Oops. It’s the known hoax.

So where are we? We have a video few people have seen, a claim it couldn’t be easily faked, proof it could be easily faked, and the fake video being claimed as the real one on the ‘net.

Still with me?

The dumbosity of this is climbing faster than even I thought it could. One thing is clear to me, though: Jeff Peckman is very, very good at wasting peoples’ time. And people are only too too happy to throw it at him.

And now here I am, taking ten minutes to write this, and that’s ten minutes I’ll never get back. Feh.

I’ll be attending the American Astronomical Society meeting in St. Louis starting Sunday (in two days! Aiiieee!), where I’ll be reporting on all the astronews goodness I can.

A bunch of astronomy bloggers will be there, and following our awesome meetup we had in Austin in January, we decided to do it again. Pamela Gay (Star Stryder, Astronomy Cast), Chris Lintott (Chris Lintott’s Universe, Galaxy Zoo), me, Nancy Atkinson (Universe Today) and probably a bunch of others will be there.

We’ll be meeting at the KitchenK restaurant on Tuesday, June 3, at 7:00 p.m. We’ll be eating, drinking, chatting, bragging, mixing, matching, gerundizing, and probably other things for which there are no words.

Be there, or B²!

So you know how it is. You and your other gorgeous, tan, and fit 20-something friends go out to a secluded site to have a star party and maybe make out a little.

But then of course — of course — wouldn’t you know it? Little blue shiny balls of weird stuff come down and abduct people and change the very laws of the universe itself!

Man, if I had a nickel for every time that happened at a star party.

But it happens at Star Party, or more accurately, the movie of that title. I watched the trailer online, and well, it doesn’t look that great. It has that whole I’m-a-horror-movie-where-stupid-people-open-doors-they-shouldn’t-and-scream-a-lot-and run-around-and-make-bad-decisions-until-you-want-to-scream-and-get-your-money-back feel to it.

But maybe that’s just me.

This is in fact a real movie (it has an IMDB page). It’s an indy film, though a lot of it looks pretty slick.

Still, I have to laugh whenever movie people try to portray scientists, or science enthusiasts. This picture is not a J Crew ad:

Yes, all us astronomers look like this, why do you ask?

The plot of the movie looks pretty silly, too, but it’s hard to tell from the trailer. I can find no copies of this movie online (including the torrents, not that I would ever use those). It came out in 2005, and obviously didn’t make much of a splash. I’m not even sure the production company, Dark Matter Productions, even exists anymore. The number listed on a website for them comes up with an answering machine that sounded very much like a totally different company.

So it sounds like this is one for the history books. Has anyone seen it?

Tip o’ the dew shield to BABloggee Heather Steingruebl, who grossly overestimates the import of these links.

GLAST is due to launch on June 5 (it was moved back a couple of days since I last mentioned it), and so you can expect to start seeing more news about it. In fact, some videos have surfaced talking about GLAST, explaining gamma rays and why we want to observe them… and one of the vids has a familiar face in it.

The first is GLASTCast, a short video series about the gamma-ray observatory produced by NASA. Here’s a link to the first one, but I think I’ll embed the second one here for reasons that’ll be obvious right away…

It’s pretty cool to see so many old friends in the video. This series has a great look, and I hope they keep making them. You can get higher-res versions on the GLASTCast page.

But if you prefer things on the lighter side, then check out this French-made video about GLAST.

I thought that was pretty funny. Note: they say that by May 17 it’ll be in orbit, but this was clearly made before the latest set of delays. Also, they use the word "film", and I suspect that’s a translation issue; they mean "image", like a single picture. GLAST doesn’t use actual film.

Anyway, I’m pretty excited to see GLAST getting close to launch. It probably won’t create the sort of blockbuster images we’re used to from observatories that see more mundane forms of light, but the science returned will be fantastic. Still, I know that over weeks it’ll build up a whole-sky map of gamma rays, which should be pretty interesting. Some simulations show that a movie of sorts can be made too, showing how the sky changes in gamma rays as the Moon (which reflects gamma rays from the Sun) moves, as gamma-ray bursts come and go, and so on. That should be pretty cool.

Tip o’ the anti-coincidence detector to Marshall Roth for the French video, and to my old boss Lynn Cominsky for the GLASTCast notice!

BABloggee Heather Steingruebl pointed out to me that the pilot for the upcoming Shuttle mission STS 124 is… Ken Ham!

[Looks furtively at calendar. Hmmm... not April 1. So this isn't a joke. Looks at picture of Ken Ham... phew!]

Yeah, it’s not the Ken Ham goofball head of Answers in Genesis, it’s astronaut Ken Ham, who apparently understands science. Or at least enough to steer the Shuttle.