The asteroid 2011 GP59 is a small rock with an orbit that takes it from just inside the orbit of Venus to just outside that of the Earth. On April 15th at around 19:00 UTC, it’ll cruise by us at a distance of about 533,000 kilometers (330,000 miles) — farther away than the Moon. This asteroid poses no threat to us, but because it does get relatively close, amateur astronomers have been able to capture it in their telescopes.

In fact, Nick James of Chelmsford, Essex, England, took a series of images on April 11, 2011 and made this video:

You may have to watch it more than once; the asteroid starts in the center of the frame and moves to the lower right. The stars appear to move as the telescope tracks the asteroid, so it can be tricky.

See how the asteroid appears to wink on and off? It’s spinning as it orbits the Sun, and must have an elongated shape. When we see the side of it we see a bigger area, which means it reflects more light and it looks brighter. When the narrow part is pointed toward us the area is smaller, and it looks dimmer. The overall size is something like 50 meters in diameter, but given the change in brightness as it spins — by a factor of over 6 times! — it must be quite elongated, more cylindrical than spherical.

Even at closest approach you’d need a decent telescope to even see GP59. Still, it’s pretty neat that we can learn so much about this rock just from a few observations, even when it was still millions of kilometers away.

Last weekend I was in NYC attending the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, aka NECSS. It was a lot of fun, as I kinda figured it would be. Skeptic conferences usually are! And of course it was a chance to catch up with a lot of old friends.

Attendees are writing their opinions of the meeting all over the place (like here, here, and here for starters). I’ll spare you the recap, which would boil down to how awesome my talk was, and cut to the chase which is to thank Michael Feldman from the New York City Skeptics, and all the folks from the New England Skeptical Society for inviting me and throwing such a fab conference.

I’d be remiss, though, if I didn’t include this little bit of funnery. Skeptical singer songwriter and BA friend George Hrab was at NECSS. On Geo’s last album, "Trebuchet", he wrote a tune called "Death from the Skies" — based on the brilliant book of the same name. He plays the funky beat, and I read statistics of getting killed by various astronomical events. We performed this song live both at Paddy Reilly’s, a bar where Geo had a gig, and to close out the ceremonies.

Here’s the recording of the latter, which is pretty laid back considering how many octillions of Joules of energy I’m talking about:

And what the heck, here we are at the somewhat more rambunctious bar the night before:

See? If you go to skeptic meetings you can experience stuff like this live. It’s way too much fun.

There are photos of NECSS popping up all over the place (search Flickr), including for example a nice set by Bruce Press. I also like this shot of Geo and me taken by Brian Engler. Apparently I had just stubbed my toe.

NECSS really is a terrific event. I hope to see you all there next year!

At the end of May, 2010, the European Space Agency’s orbiting Herschel telescope was pointed toward a dark cloud in space over 2500 light years away. What it saw may solve a bit of a scientific mystery… and is also truly beautiful:

[Click to ennebulanate.]

This object is called IC5146, and consists of the Cocoon nebula on the left, and two long streamers of gas extending to the right. Herschel is very sensitive to cold dust in the very far infrared; in this image blue shows gas and dust emitting at a wavelength of 70 microns (the reddest color the human eye can see is roughly 0.7 microns), green is 250 microns, and red 500 microns — that’s over 700 times the longest wavelength light the eye can detect.

The Cocoon nebula is a well-known gas cloud being lit up by a massive, hot star in its center. In the visible light image inset here — grab the stunning high-res version to compare to the Herschel shot — the dust is dark, since it absorbs the kind of light we see. Also, stars are pretty faint at these extreme infrared wavelengths, so they don’t interfere with the observations of the gas and dust. That’s why observatories like Herschel are so important: they allow us to investigate objects that might be invisible to other telescopes.

As you can see in the Herschel image, the entire region is interlaced with long, thin filaments of dust. This dust is cold: much of it is only about 15° Celsius above absolute zero, or -430°F! What’s so very interesting is that the filaments, no matter what length they are (and as seen in other parts of the sky by Herschel as well), seem to have about the same width of roughly 0.3 light years across. That argues very strongly that these filaments are formed from turbulence in the dust, probably caused by exploding stars roiling up the matter between stars. That width is just about what you’d expect as shock waves from exploding stars slam into each other, interact, and become turbulent.

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This is quite simply the bestest thing ever.

Man, if my school had an assembly like this for us when I was a kid, I might’ve stuck with studying dinosaurs. Also? I want one for Dragon*Con.

Every year, a contest is held to find the best 50 science blog articles on the web. Submitted by popular vote and chosen by a set of editors, the winners are then printed in a book called The Open Laboratory. The newest edition for 2010 is now online and has been made available for ordering!

I’m proud to have my articles included in previous years’ books (2006, 2007, and 2008), and once again have one appear in this year’s version: Ten Things You Don’t Know About Comets. I had to do some editing to get this post into book form, and I hope you like the effort.

The essays chosen are quite good, so I recommend heading over to Lulu.com and ordering yourself a copy! It’s an awful lot of science geekery for just 18 bucks.

I don’t think it matters how good a job your parents did raising you, no matter how great and supportive and wonderful they were, you will still get a twinge of jealousy when you read about the birthday party this mom threw for her son. You have to read the whole thing to appreciate it.

As a taste (haha!) here is a picture of the table setting:

Yes, that planet the astronaut is standing on is actually the birthday cake, suspended above the table!

Someone keep an eye on that kid. I suspect in 20 years or so NASA will want to recruit him. If he’s not running the joint by then.

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to Steve deGroof.

I took a family vacation recently (as those who follow me on Twitter already know; see also here, and here). I haven’t talked about it at all, but we were visiting friends in Mexico. We took a day to visit the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza — the day after the Equinox, thankfully; it’s massively crowded there due to a light show on the Temple of Kukulkan, the great ziggurat there — and it was spectacular. I promise I will write about that at some point, for what I hope are obvious reasons.

But in the meantime, since it’s Caturday, and I’ve chosen to expand that to any animal, here is a little fella we saw while we were there:

[Click to iguananate.]

We actually saw dozens of iguanas, and my brother-in-law Chris took lots of excellent pictures of them (like this one, too).

We learned the Mayan word for iguana is xtoloc, pronounced SHTO-lok. This is my new favorite word in the whole world (ironically, taking the spot previously held by "Quetzlcoatl"). Whenever we see a lizard on TV, I turn to The Little Astronomer and say, knowingly, "Xtoloc", and it always gets a smile from her.

If I ever write a Star Trek story, I will name a Vulcan character Xtoloc.

I actually learned many Mayan words while down there, and it’s just about the coolest spoken language I’ve ever heard. Plus, they start lots of words with X, which is really just inherently cool as well.