Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Note to my readers: This is also cross-posted on The SkepticBlog, the blog of The Skeptologists.

I want to indulge myself for a moment and follow up on what Ryan wrote about our shoot at Mt. Wilson.

When we shot The Skeptologists, I had never been to Mt. Wilson before. I’ve been to a few observatories, including some small ones affiliated with Universities, Mt. Stromlo in Australia, and the IAC facilities on La Palma in the Canary Islands.

These are all fantastic places to visit, but they’re relatively new. Mt. Wilson has been around for a long, long time, and even better, we filmed in the dome of the Hooker 100″ telescope. When I found that out, I was ecstatic! This was the very telescope used by Edwin Hubble when he was investigating the nature of what they used to call simply "nebulae", what we now call galaxies.

When we got there, I was not disappointed. The ’scope is magnificent! I love the brute force steelworks of it, the criss-crossing braces, the sky-blue paint. The control board was very retro (duh), and had an almost steampunk feel to it.

But the best part was when we went down into the pit, the bottom of the dome where we could stand under the magnificent ’scope. I was peering around, and when I was underneath it I happened to look up. My eyes caught a flash of green, and I realized I was seeing the 100″ mirror itself. It was supported by a maze of steel, but gaps in the bracing and random bits of machinery and metal left a clear view of the glass.

I had an odd moment, thinking of the photons that hit that glass a century ago. They had traveled millions of light years through space before being reflected by that mirror. The galaxies observed by Hubble had emitted countless fleets of them, more photons than there are stars in the sky. The vast majority flew off into open space, and still ply their way between galaxies. But a tiny fraction of those made it to Earth. Some were absorbed by our atmosphere, and some few of those were aimed right down the telescope’s gullet. A fraction of those were absorbed by the mirror itself as well as the other mirrors used by the telescope to focus the light.

Out of the countless octillions of photons that started their journey, only a few made it into Hubble’s detectors. And from those scant particles of light, he and his fellow astronomer (Slipher, Hale, and others) discovered the Universe itself is expanding.

I stood there thinking of all that, and I couldn’t help it. I reached up and touched the back of the mirror. I laughed at myself a little; a skeptic connecting with a chunk of glass. I didn’t feel any vibrations, no sense of Hubble’s energy, no rapport with the history.

And yet… we’re still apes, we humans. We can see something, hear it, taste it; but it’s our fingers that relay so much of the sense of what’s around us. Nothing New Agey or superstitious, just a simian need to fulfill the part of the brain that desires the tactile sensation of connection.

But still. Touching that glass put me there. That part of my brain firing up gave me the extra dimension of sense, the understanding, the knowing, and (yes) the feeling the history of the place. And there is history at Mt. Wilson; our grand explorations of the cosmos took a major leap there. When I reached out my hand, that’s what I was experiencing, if only vicariously.

I remember it better now than I would have otherwise. I can still picture it all, can remember how it felt, and my sense of awe remains unabated.

It was, simply, cool.

And even a skeptic responds to that.

The California Literary Review asked me to answer some questions pertaining to Chapter 1 of my book, Death from the Skies!, where I talk about asteroid impacts. They’ve posted my replies on their site.

This is such a broad and interesting topic, and it’s really hard to boil down the important stuff to just a few dozen words. I tend to be a bit, um, wordy, so sometimes I have a hard time saying my name in a few dozen words, but I hope that the Q&A gives you a sense of what’s going on.

For the past few months I’ve been doing a series of short astronomy videos with producer/director Tom Lucas. Unlike my own videos I do in my house, these are professionally made, and I’ve been very happy with the past few.

Yesterday the sixth episode was posted, called "Hubble’s Hotties". It’s a Top Ten List of Hubble images, except it’s only really the Top Six. Sorry, but there’s only so much you can squeeze into five minutes!

It’s also available in high-res (click the link under the video on the YouTube page).

We filmed this at the Denver Museum of Science & Nature, and I’m grateful for the use of their facility. And I’ll be back there on the 11th of December to give a talk about asteroid impacts and my book, Death from the Skies! It’s a great place, and I hope some of you can join me there.

I love it when astronomers release beautiful images simply because they are beautiful.

That’s Omega Centauri, a globular cluster. It contains millions of stars, all gravitationally bound to one another. It orbits the Milky Way and is currently about 18,000 light years away. At 150 light years across, it’s a densely packed beehive of stars.

It’s also easily visible to the unaided eye. Centaurus is a southern constellation, so it’s high overhead if you live south of the Equator. But many years ago, while I was doing my Master’s research at the University of Virginia, I saw it with my own eyes. I was out on the telescope catwalk that circled the dome, and was just looking at the stars. Right on the horizon, nestled between two Smoky Mountain peaks, was a fuzzy dot. I watched it for a few minutes, puzzling over what it could be. A cloud? No, it wasn’t moving. Smoke from a chimney? Maybe, but in the summer?

Then it hit me. Omega Cen? No, couldn’t be! But I went inside and checked the cluster’s coordinates. Knowing my latitude, I did the numbers in my head and realized that Omega Cen could just barely be seen, given the conditions: I was up high, looking between two mountains, and atmospheric refraction (the bending of light from stars upward due to the Earth’s air) near the horizon would lend a hand as well. I checked through binoculars, but the thick air only made the fuzzy dot a little bigger.

Still, that was an amazing moment for me; I had no idea you could see Omega Cen that far north. Of course, when you observe it from Chile with a 2.2 meter ’scope, you get a slightly better view, as shown above.

And let me repeat: the European Southern Observatory didn’t release this image to go with any big scientific result. It was just simply a gorgeous image, and they wanted to share. Awesome.

Image courtesy ESO.

On December 1, Venus, Jupiter, and the Moon made this pretty formation in the sky:

That shot was taken on my little department store digital camera. All I did was mount it on a good tripod and bracket the exposure (that is, take a bunch of shots with different exposure times). I knew my neighbor’s tree would make an interesting sight in a longish (10 second) exposure, and tried to balance the foreground objects. The glowing clouds were a nice bonus.

My point is, taking pretty shots of astronomical events is not terribly hard, and if you have even basic equipment you should take the opportunity to try.

Search Flickr for "Venus Moon Jupiter" to see tons of results from folks who took photos of this remarkable event. Dave Mosher on Discovery’s blog has more, as does Scott Hurst, and pretty much every other astronomy blog out there. It’s nice to see so many folks giving this a shot. If you have a picture online, link to it in the comments and let others see how yours look!

The Big Picture (the Boston Globe’s high-res photo feature) has a new idea: an advent calendar using Hubble pictures! Every day, TBP will post a new Hubble image with a brief explanation, leading up to Christmas.

TBP’s proprietor, Alan Taylor, had asked if I wanted to pitch in, but sadly I am overwhelmed with work right now (including researching this year’s Top Ten Astronomy Pictures; stay tuned for more info on that!) so he’s on his own… but judging by his first choice (V838 Monocerotis) I think he’ll do just fine.

Alexander Thatte is a young boy in the UK, the son of two physicists at Oxford University. He has leukemia, and he needs a new, expensive treatment. To raise funds, friends at the Oxford physics department have put together SkyPhoto: you can buy a framed print from the venerable Palomar Sky Survey, and funds go toward Alexander’s treatment.

The prints appear to look pretty nice, and they are semi-random: you can request a star field, a galaxy, or a nebula. There are added options too, like having them signed by Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell, who co-discovered pulsars in the 1960s. They are currently accepting checks (in UK pounds Sterling) only; you can download and print out the order form. They will ship overseas, however. There may be eBay auctions soon, so you can get them that way as well (and use PayPal if you’re set up for it). I’ll update this post when I find out more.

‘Tis the season, and this makes a pretty nice gift. Plus, you know you’re doing something good for someone, too.