The 134th Carnival of Space blog festival has been posted at Cumbrian Sky, and it’s the Christmas edition! So expect lots of cool blog posts collected about space and astronomy, just like usual, except now with 52% more Christmasy stuff. So it’ll give you something to do when things get a little too Yuley at home and you just need to get away for a few minutes.
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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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December 23rd, 2009 at 8:07 pm
Oh No! Oh No! The BA used the dreaded ‘c’ word – Christmas!
December 23rd, 2009 at 8:13 pm
The 134th Carnival of Space blog festival has been posted at Cumbrian Sky,
For a second there, I read *Cumbrian* as *Cambrian* instead & wondered how the blazes you could know about those skies back about 500 million years ago!
(NB. 542 to 488 million years to be precise on checking via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian )
Hmm … Time travel? Super-computer simulation?
What skies would the trilobites have seen?
Many of the stars in our night sky weren’t even born then, many others that would have been bright back then have since gone supernova or died as planetary nebula.
Sirius, for instance, only became the brightest star in our night sky 90,ooo years ago and only formed 250 million years ago as a binary B3 blue dwarf and Sirian dwarf. Mira has only been a Mira (long period variable) for 30,000 years. Rigel, Betelgeux, Eta Carinae and all the other high mass supergiants would have been far in the future then – given they live but a few million years, less than ten in most cases.
Plus the stars move very slowly but over millions of years as teh Sunorbits teh Galxy and other stars shift positions over themillennia. Which stars would have been our neighbours then and how brightly may they have shone?
It it wouldn’t just be the Cambrain stars that’d be different. The Moon would have been closer and larger in the sky, the very length of the day different if I recall, what comets and asteroids would have graced the Cambrian skies. Guess we’ll never know. Fun to imagine though.
Cumbria is Wale is right?
December 23rd, 2009 at 8:32 pm
“Cumbria is Wale is right?”
Hmmm … Nope. I got that wrong.
Turns out on Wikipedia seraching that Cumbria is a a non-metropolitan county in the North West of England. See : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbria
Also correcting typos from comment 2 – ran out of time to edit alas :
Plus the stars move very slowly but over millions of years as our Sun orbits our Galaxy’s centre and all other stars shift positions over the millennia. Which stars would have been our neighbours then and how brightly may they have shone?
Is what I meant obviously. Oops.
December 24th, 2009 at 5:21 am
The galaxy is in…how do you say it?…Orion’s…Belt.
December 24th, 2009 at 8:21 am
@ 4. complex field Says:
The galaxy is in…how do you say it?…Orion’s…Belt.
Err … no. Actually, it is the other way around – Orion’s Belt is in our Galaxy.
As just a very tiny part of our Milky Way Galaxy.
PS. Not sure if you were joking there or something complex field bu-uut just to clarify things.
PPS. Merry Christmas to all & to all a good night!
(Christmas already in my time zone.)
December 24th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Neat to have a Christmas tree ornament like that- a couple of years ago someone marketed (very pricily) in the UK a celestial globe using real compiled all-sky digital photo elements. Nothing drawn. Can’t remember who it was (wish I could). But the data are out there if anyone wants to do it today (make gores for the globe this way?).
Anyway, why couldn’t the same technique be used to make ornaments, maybe even with colored transparent elements over certain colored bright stars, and a bulb inside?
December 24th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
MTU @ 5… MIB reference. Orion was a cat. It wasn’t really a belt, it was a collar.
December 24th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Thanks, Buzz! Sorry about that lamp thing…..