This incredible work is the brainchild of Nick Risinger, who traveled a hundred thousand kilometers in total to get the 37,440 photographs necessary to make this 5000 megapixel mosaic!
It shows the entire sky, and you can play with the interactive version that has toggled constellation outlines and is mapped into equal-area projection, or zoom in and out of the rectangular image. Both are simply amazing.
The images are sharp and clear, with a lot of detail. You can zoom in on the Orion Nebula, the Andromeda Galaxy, or just something that catches your eye. He used "natural color" (LRGB) filters, with the addition of one that accentuates warm hydrogen gas; you can see that as the diffuse red clouds scattered across the sky. I was floored by the quality of this mosaic, and spent a lot of time just panning around, seeing what there was to see. The region near the galactic center and along the plane are stunning.
You should read his story of how he made it, too. It’s inspiring. It took him a long time and an amount of effort I have a hard time comprehending. I’m glad he did, of course, not just because of the beautiful outcome of his travails, but also simply because it makes me happy to know there are people out there so willing to devote so much to doing what they love.
Image used under Creative Commons license, by Nick Risinger, skysurvey.org
After I posted about SETI this morning, I found this video on YouTube. The master of communicating science, Carl Sagan, explains why we need to listen to the skies.
The other day, noted skeptic Dr. Steve Novella appeared on the Dr. Oz TV show. Steve is a promoter of medicine based on solid science, proven techniques, and reproducible results. Dr. Oz, um, not so much. In fact, on his show Oz has promoted questionable (at best, if not outright dangerous and provably false) things like homeopathy, faith healers, and even talking-to-the-dead guru John Edward. Oz has had such anti-science leanings of late that the James Randi Educational Foundation gave him their 2011 Pigasus Media Award.
Steve did a great job on the show, the best he could, but was hamstrung by the format of the show which gave Oz the last word and allowing him to frame the entire situation. You can read Steve’s synopsis of the episode on his site, and Orac has an excellent summary as well.
As a followup to this, Steve has invited Dr. Oz to appear either on his blog or on Steve’s podcast, the excellent Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. I think this is a fantastic idea, since that would remove Oz’s ability to frame things the way he wants, and would force him to defend his alt-med claims on their actual merits.
That link goes to the short invitation mentioned above. I encourage my readers to retweet that tweet, write about this, and (politely!) contact Dr. Oz about it as well.
It’s easy to defend alt-med when you control the venue. But I think it would be interesting indeed to hear Dr. Oz defend it when he’s a) given enough time to fairly and completely make his point, and then 2) have educated, intelligent, well-informed skeptics questioning it.
NASA’s phenomenal Solar Dynamics Observatory has spent just over a year in space. During that time it has ceaselessly observed the Sun, returning incredibly detailed and exquisite images and videos. In high resolution we’ve seen sunspots, flares, coronal mass ejections, filaments, prominences, and towering loops of magnetic plasma.
To celebrate, the folks at SDO put together this video featuring 12 of their favorite clips. I’ve written about several of these myself in the past year (see Related Posts below). Make sure you set the resolution to 720p!
You can go to the SDO page to get a list of what you’re seeing.
In a related bit of news, NASA is asking people to vote on their favorite short video from SDO. Many of those clips are also in the above video, but they’re also listed separately on the NASA contest page. I know which one is my favorite… but I’m not telling.
Today is the 21st anniversary of Hubble’s launch into space — I wrote about this the other day, when a pretty picture of colliding galaxies was released, but got the date wrong. So today really is the anniversary! To celebrate, LIFE online put up a nice gallery of some of Hubble’s best images.
They have a lot of the usual choices (though they left off a few that surprise me, like the Deep Field images), but it’s still worth clicking through. Some day I’ll pick my favorite Hubble images and do the same thing, but geez, what a vast uphill climb that would be! Winnowing it down to, say, my top 50 would be hard enough! Of course, you can always check out my Ten Things You Don’t Know About Hubble to tide you over, too.
My pal Jennifer Ouellette, who writes the delightful blog Cocktail Party Physics, was recently interviewed at Tech Republic. As usual, she’s fun to read.
On that page they embedded the video of Jennifer when she appeared on Craig Ferguson’s TV show, which I totally forgot to do when she was on! So here’s the video of her talking about her book The Calculus Diaries:
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He's written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic and fights the abuse of science, but his true love is praising the wonders of real science.
The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking, movie reviews, and all that) can be found here.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
"If things worked the way I wanted them to, any reporter about to do another 'sensational' story on deadly meteors would consult this volume, and bang! common sense would find its way into the news. How strange would that world be?" -- Adam Savage, Mythbusters
"Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan. Frightening, but oddly exhilarating." -- Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising
