Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Oh, I have a very cool anaglyph (red-green 3D images) for you! Stuart Atkinson from the Cumbrian Sky blog has created some fantastic anaglyphs of images from the Mars rover Opportunity as it investigates Concepcion crater. Here are some blocks that look like ejecta from the impact itself:

[Click to embiggen.]

These are beautiful! They almost look sedimentary, which at least makes some sense given that the region Opportunity is roving, Meridiani Planum, was once under water. Closeups of those rocks show they have the famous "blueberries", concretions of jarosite formed by mineral-laden water.

Stuart has lots more pictures he’s fiddled with, too, and it’s well worth your looking around his site. You should also read Emily Lakdawalla’s great description of Concepcion, talking about how we know it’s a fresh crater about 1000 years old. It’s a fascinating read.

I was pleasantly surprised to see my old friend Kevin Grazier — planetary scientist with Cassini, and science advisor for Battlestar Galactica and Eureka — highlighted in a Eureka Unscripted blog post. It’s a two-parter, with the second one going up sometimes soon.

At the same time, it was cool to see another friend, Jennifer Ouellette, talking about the science of Eureka as well! I like the show, and while the science is sometimes warped a bit (or a lot) for story-telling, I know for a fact the executive producer and writers try to get as much right as they can. The EP, Jaime Paglia, is a smart and funny guy; I was on a panel with him at Comic Con a couple of years ago (with Kevin, too!) and moderated one that he was on as well. His role is not that of a science teacher, but a story teller. But even so, he and his team, strive to base what they do on solid science.

Plus? It’s just a fun show. That’s why I like Fringe, too. Look: I am the biggest hard case you’ll find when it comes to accuracy in science fiction, but even I know when to hang it up if the story is fun. That way I can actually sit back and enjoy stuff like Doctor Who and Star Trek without getting all twisted up into a pseudo-Riemannian 11-dimensional manifold.

See what I did there? Yeah, if you did, you’re a dork too.

I was recently interviewed on EarthSky about Obama’s budget and future plans for NASA. I talked about some of the things I covered in my earlier blog post, but I also added some thoughts about where I see NASA going and what I see its role is.

I’ll have more to say about this soon; I’ve been thinking about it more and I’m scratching my head over some of it.

Anyway, EarthSky is a site filled with interviews from scientists, and has a lot of great content. They cut my interview into two versions; a short 90 second one, and a longer 8-minute on. Both are recorded and on that page. They put up a transcript for the shorter version, but I suggest you listen to the 8-minute version instead.

I say that because whenever I read a transcript of an interview I’ve done, it reads like I’m on some sort of drug. But then I read transcripts from other people who are speaking extemporaneously, and they all sound that way. It’s funny how we parse information we read differently than that we hear. I swear it made sense when I said it– and I’m glad they have the interview recorded on that page as well. So again I’ll urge you to listen to the full 8-minute recording, since there’s more there than on the transcript anyway.

I’ve been posting sporadically on how sunspots are starting to come back to the Sun, and I’m glad to see a new group sprouted up recently… and it’s a monster:

These images are from SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. The orange one is in visible light, and the sunspots are pretty obvious. The green one shows the Sun in the far ultraviolet, and you can see the sunspots are pretty intense, blasting out high-energy light. Sunspots are indicators of magnetic activity, and the intense magnetic field can accelerate plasma (ionized gas) to high energies.

Just so’s you know, a hundred Earths could fit across this image, so that oughta give you an idea of just how big these blemishes are.

What this means is that the Sun is becoming active again. You can see it better in this video I put together using SOHO animations. These are real SOHO observations. Note that some of the data are missing so the Sun’s rotation is a bit jerky, and that you can see that data dropouts and other problems plague these sort of observations. Oh– actually, another group popped up on the Sun earlier, too, and you can see those in the visible light data.

You can actually see the plasma flowing along the magnetic field lines in the latter part of the video.

Right now, the Sun is struggling to climb back up to the peak of its magnetic cycle, which will probably occur in 2013 or later, given how slow this has been — which you might want to keep in mind if some crackpot or scammer is trying to sell you on the idea that solar activity will destroy the Earth in 2012. When the Sun is at its peak, the magnetic field is at its strongest, and we see the most sunspots. However, the strongest solar flares and other explosive events tend not to happen until well after the cycle peaks, so it’ll be late 2013 or 2014 before we see the most vigorous activity, if the Sun holds to its previous behavior.

Again, people selling you on 2012 disasters generally have a very tenuous grasp on science. The less you know the better for them.

I expect we’ll be seeing more and more sunspots now as time goes by. It’s nice to see this happening, as it adds to the activity seen in December, and ends a long period of minimal sunspots — heck, for a long time, there were none at all. Boring. Now we can look forward to some exciting action again… just in time for SDO to launch, too!

[P.S. If anyone can tell me why the first few frames of my uploaded videos turn gray sometimes, that would be nice. I don't know whether to curse iMovie, Flash, YouTube, or all three.]

Image credit: SOHO (ESA and NASA)

Of course I have like 20 minutes before I have to leave to catch a plane (yes, at 3:30 frakking in the a.m.) but I had to let y’all know about this: a video with a lot of famous and not-so-famous geeks singing the "Boom-de-yadda" song:

And now I can honestly say I’ve worked with WHil WHeaton! WH00t! You can find out who’s in it and all that on Boing Boing. It was created by Elaine Doyle and Olga Nunes, and I thank them for letting me be in it!

The Solar Dynamics Observatory, due for launch on February 9 at 10:30 Eastern time (15:30 GMT), is a revolution in solar observing: equipped with state-of-the art detectors, it’ll stare at the Sun and teach us far more about our closest star than we’ve ever had a chance to before. It’s like SOHO on steroids.

I was going to write up a lengthy post about it, but then I found out my friend Nicole Gravitationaliotta, aka The Noisy Astronomer, already put together a great post about it. That saves me time.

Something I want to point out: SDO will have a continuous science data streamrate of a whopping 16 megabytes per second. You might want to read that again. That’s 1.4 terabytes per day, or half a petabyte per year. Given that a Blu-Ray disk holds 50 gigabytes at most, that means SDO would fill 28 disks a day just to store that data. Cripes. That’s a vast amount of data to sift through. If the Sun is hiding anything, it has about a week to figure out what to do. After that we’ll be watching everything it does.

Also, a fun thing about this for me is that the project scientist for SDO is Barbara Thompson, a woman I’ve known a long, long time: her office was across from mine when I was working on Hubble, and I would often drop by to swap stories with her and generally mix it up. It’s very cool to know that an old friend will be helping run such a fantastic astronomical instrument.

[Update; The launch was scrubbed due to low clouds. The next launch attempt will be at 04:14 Eastern (09:14 GMT) Monday morning... but they're predicting 60% chance of low clouds again!]

Don’t forget: the Space Shuttle Endeavor is scheduled to launch tomorrow, Sunday February 7, at 04:39 Eastern time (09:39 GMT). It’s the last planned night launch of a shuttle. I will not be live-tweeting it, since that’s 02:30 my time and I’m not staying up for it (I have to travel Monday and don’t need to screw up my system that much). But a lot of folks are there and will be tweeting it as it happens, like Universe Today’s Nancy Atkinson. Follow her for more info as it happens.

Image credit: NASA.