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My friend and fellow astronomer and astronomy evangelist Dan Durda just let me know he’ll be on tonight’s episode of Universe on The History Channel. He’ll be talking up what he does best: asteroid impacts and extinction events. Oddly, I have an affinity for those as well. So, if you have a TV check Dan out as he apocalypticizes. It’s on at 21:00 Eastern (US) time.
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The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking, movie reviews, and all that) can be found here.
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 | Bad Astronomy was chosen as one of Time.com's Best Blogs of 2009. |
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September 1st, 2009 at 1:56 pm
With a cool plane like that Dan should be driving a Maserati to the airport.
September 1st, 2009 at 2:45 pm
I admit I can’t watch HC’s Universe. It’s one of those science programs that tries to pimp it using lots of virtual (not so accurate) scenes and every shot lasts less than 2 seconds. It gives me seizures.
September 1st, 2009 at 3:05 pm
@2: I can’t watch much of the History Channel, period. It’s cheesy and inaccurate/misleading by turns.
September 1st, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Dan Durda Rocks! And think of it this way, HC Haters (and I include myself in that crowd): Dan’s RealDealness displaces such HC staples as Nostrodumbass or Knights Templar.
Tune in and then tune back out. No one’s gonna steal your clicker while Dan is on.
September 1st, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Phil Why don’t you write a book about things that can cause Death from the skies!….
some one had to say it
September 1st, 2009 at 5:55 pm
@Davros,
And then it could be put on Amazon, and some notable person, like maybe Adam Savage, could make pithy pull quotes on it!
How strange would that be?
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:42 am
Phil, was that your car that got hit with the meteor in the trunk?
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:45 am
I have seen three fireballs in my 62 years and all seem to have burned up moving across the sky. All looked to be as large as a street light. One broke into three pieces which seemed to rain down towards Canada. The other two just burned out moving across the sky.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:50 am
Once I saw an explosion in the sky. I expected it to be a bombed airliner. It turned out there was an early morning launch from a new location off the east coast. I saw the separation and flame out from Ohio. I thought the other fireballs were space junk.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:53 am
I drive to work at night and drive home before dawn. Hence the chance to see light shows in the sky.
September 2nd, 2009 at 7:01 am
Venus and distant clouds put on a neat UFO impersonation a couple of years ago. First a tiny light in the sky quickly flew at me growing larger and brighter. Then it receded rapidly till it faded out. Then it came forward again as the nearly invisible distant clouds drifted away leaving me with a clear view of Venus. It appeared to be coming at me so fast, that I stopped my car and got out to see what it was. Distant clouds in a dark sky are almost invisible as they cover and uncover Venus with various increases and decreases in size and brightness.” The UFO was moving in and out at a fantastic rate of speed.”……until the clouds moved away.
September 3rd, 2009 at 11:48 am
Like Taf (#2), I am annoyed by a lot of those documentaries that purport to be about science. I watched this one because the BA was touting it. IMO, it was actually better than average for this sort of thing; but that is not saying much. I want to mention one really glaring error:
Very near the end of the show, after mentioning that there is a lot of space junk up there that will stay up there for a long time because of the lack of air resistance, comes the following grossly wrong statement: “But they will eventually undergo orbital decay. They will lose energy because there’s very little atmospheric drag, and the earth’s gravity will drag them back down into its atmosphere.” (Sounds like early Star Trek logic to me.)
Immediately after the narrator’s gaff comes the talking head of Bill Ailor who explains it correctly. They had a lot of experts on the show. You’d think they could have passed the final script to one of them for proof reading. What I find especially distressing is that it appears that they allow the narration script to be written by folks who do not even understand the basics of what is supposed to be presented.
(One of my pet peeves about the low quality science documentaries is that they will often use stock footage to illustrate words that are being used as metaphors. Such words are not effective unless the hearer has already developed the appropriate semantic reaction. If he does not know the word, illustrating the concept is still not going to help the metaphor work in the new context. But someone who fails to appreciate the metaphorical usage may type the word into a stock footage database to come with some irrelevant pictures.)
September 5th, 2009 at 2:08 am
Phil, unless I’m mistaken the program you’re talking about is titled ‘The Universe.’ You wrote, ‘Universe.’ Dan was on the ‘It Fell From Space’ episode.
#12 David
Forgive them for the bad choice of wording. It’s edutainment, not college science course material.
I love The Universe’ on THC. It’s excellent. I own season 1 & 2 and am waiting for a good deal to buy season 3 and season 4 when it’s available (season 4 available for pre-order now). In fact, 4 has just started so be sure to TiVo a season pass or catch up on reruns of older programs they air. Dan and the other astronomers do a fantastic job enticing and exciting us with the wonders of our universe. I highly recommend it.
September 8th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
fred edison, who himself worries about such nits as the presence or not of the definite article, suggests that I forgive the show’s producers for a “bad choice of wording”. Sorry. The statement to which I referred suffers from far more than a bad choice of wording. It is just plain wrong! There is no way to put a correct interpretation on it. (I even replayed it multiple times to make sure I was hearing it correctly.) Any of their experts would have caught the error immediately had they been given a chance. It could conceivably have been a typo or a misreading of the script; but neither would excuse leaving it in the finished show.