Photographer Maik Thomas posted this time lapse video on Google+, and it made me chuckle. The bright object is the Moon, and as it sets it turns red, looking like a missile from space curving right into a church.

I love the star trails effect. It’s just a way of adding the individual frames together to show motion, but it does give the video an oddly other-world feel to it. And in this case it really makes the Moon look like some sort of re-entering rocket!

This is cute and all, but I was debating whether to run it on the blog or not when I got to the 1:05 mark or so, and decided to go ahead. Why? Watch:

Did you get the joke?

It’s a Chandra X-ray Observatory image in the background if that helps. Note the cat.

Also, the next shot shown of a cat batting at Io was also pretty funny.

They did miss a sure bet, though: Cat’s Eye, and the Cat’s Paw nebula. Neither of which, I’ll note, is in Leo.

I have nothing to add to this, except to say it’s great, and I saw it because Brian Cox mentioned it on Twitter.

Oh yeah: one more thing; watch it in HD and full screen. Coooool.

As a scientist, I can guarantee that the closest a solid object can be to a liquid state is a cat snoozing on a staircase in the sunshine.

If you read my blog (and you’d better accept that as an axiom) then you have probably heard of Chris Hardwick. His podcast, Nerdist, is a monstrous juggernaut of podcasty geekiness, for one thing. And he’s been on Craig Ferguson’s show, and Conan, and Chelsea Lately, and a bunch of others. He wrote a book on how being a nerd can make your life better. Chris is something of a Doctor Who fan — proof, you want? — and so he and I have significant overlap in our lives. We met at Comic Con a couple of years ago, but we haven’t managed to get together since then.

But all that will change on Friday, March 2, when Chris will be bringing the Nerdist podcast here to Boulder, live at the Boulder Theater!

Chris and his co-hosts Jonah Ray and Matt Mira will be on stage making the nerdery in my fair town, and — wait for it, waaaiiittt for ittttt — Chris has invited me to be his guest.

I don’t know what we’ll be talking about, but I’m sure it will cover these topics at the least: the Doctor, growing up geeky, astronomy, w00tstock, space travel, the Mythbusters, zombies, and which of us wants to run off with River Song more. Probably pretty much in that order.

I feel obligated to note that if you’re not familiar with Chris’s podcast, it might be possible that it should be considered just ever so slightly NSFW. Or maybe a lot. Just so’s you know.

Tickets are on sale now! If you’re in the area come on by… and face it, if you’re reading this blog and you know who Chris is you have nothing else to do on a Friday night anyway.

P.S. If you’re not around Boulder, the Nerdist Podcast Live is going to be at a bunch of other towns as well, so look for one near you.

In what is becoming an annual January tradition celebrating my laziness, I’m reposting this article about why astronomers are no fun at New Year’s parties. Well, they can be, but only until you actually say "Happy New Year!" to them, whereupon they’ll corner and lecture you about how to measure orbital periods. It’s amazing any astronomers reproduce. Anyway, here’s the article, which was a lot of fun to originally write, and even more fun to cut and paste here.]

Yay! It’s a new year!

But what does that mean, exactly?

The year, of course, is the time it takes for the Earth to orbit the Sun, right? Well, not exactly. It depends on what you mean by "year", and how you measure it. This takes a wee bit of explaining, so while the antacid is dissolving in your stomach to remedy last night’s excesses, sit back and let me tell you the tale of the year.

First, I will ignore a few things. For example, time zones. These were invented by a sadistic watchmaker, who only wanted to keep people in thrall of his devious plans. So for now, let’s just ignore them, and assume that for these purposes you spend a whole year (whatever length of time that turns out to be) planted in one spot.

However, I will not ignore the rotation of the Earth. That turns (haha) out to be important.

Let’s take a look at the Earth from a distance. From our imaginary point in space, we look down and see the Earth and the Sun. The Earth is moving, orbiting the Sun. Of course it is, you think to yourself. But how do you measure that? For something to be moving, it has to be moving relative to something else. What can we use as a yardstick against which to measure the Earth’s motion?

Well, we might notice as we float in space that we are surrounded by zillions of pretty stars. We can use them! So we mark the position of the Earth and Sun using the stars as benchmarks, and then watch and wait. Some time later, the Earth has moved in a big circle and is back to where it started in reference to those stars. That’s called a "sidereal year" (sidus is the Latin word for star). How long did that take?

Let’s say we used a stopwatch to measure the elapsed time. We’ll see that it took the Earth 31,558,149 seconds (some people like to approximate that as pi x 10 million (31,415,926) seconds, which is an easy way to be pretty close). But how many days is that?
(more…)

… are something you won’t be getting from me with this post.

Instead, here’s a video of George Hrab and me watching a shark balloon at Dragon*Con earlier this year.

Because why not?