Blogs / Bad Astronomy

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.

Does this NASA photo from the rover Opportunity show a wooden log on Mars?

Hard to tell? Then look at the zoomed-in image, and ask again: is this a log (petrified or otherwise) on the surface of the Red Planet?

Duh. No.

But if you read some websites, you might think it is. So what’s going on here?

The quick answer is: this is another in a long line of examples of pareidolia; people seeing familiar things in random or semi-random patterns. In other words, this looks like a log, but it ain’t. Remember the Martian Bigfoot? Yeah, this is the same kind of thing.

How do I know? Well, lots of reasons. For one thing, this photo is from 2005. Had any scientist studying Mars seen this and thought it was actually wood, I think they would have said something by now.

Second, there’s no evidence at all of any macroscopic plant life on Mars. The vista shown here is a vast range of desert. What are the odds there would be a log smack dab in the way of the the rover as it moves across Mars? Note too that the tracks go right over the object; Opportunity literally ran it over. That means lots of people in the control room on Earth saw this object, yet no one said anything about it being a log. And if you think they’re covering it up, then why did they publish the image in a press release?

Third, look to the right of the "log". There are two rocks that look a lot like it:

That image is slightly different from the one I displayed above, with better contrast. See how the rocks are the same color as the "log"? And look at the patterns on the rocks; they’re the same too. The linear patterns even line up with those of the longer object! This indicates we’re looking at a rock here.

And finally, fourth: I mean, c’mon. A log? On Mars? Sheesh.

Clearly what we’re seeing here is another rock, probably different than the flat rocks that are paler, but very similar to the darker ones. It looks like a petrified log, but then we know that many things look like other things. Wasp nests look like Buddha (or the StayPuft Marshmallow Man), and rocks look like Bigfoot (which is like a case of meta-nonsense, given we’re talking Bigfoot).

It’s certainly an interesting object, since it’s long, and all the other rocks are not. I imagine that geologically there’s some story behind it. But I really really don’t think it involves wood.

But that won’t stop the goofballs out there, breathlessly playing this silliness up. One site said this photo was leaked. Yeah, leaked, as a frackin’ press release on the NASA site!

Cripes.

Another site goes on about how maybe it’s a log and maybe it’s not, but who can trust NASA? After all, it’s so easy to fake pictures. But they don’t make the logical connection that if NASA faked the image, then (again) why did they publish it in a press release but make no mention of the object itself?

It’s frustrating that unthinking nonsense like this gets spread so quickly through the web. It’s the Ebola of science, and far too may people are far too willing to pass the virus on. It relies heavily on people not understanding science (and skepticism) all that well, and them also not understanding that seeing is not necessarily believing.

So if you see something like this, think about it before sending it on to the next victim. Does the claim really make sense? Is it supported by the data you have, and is there evidence against it? And you can always look to my blog here for more, or to other places like the BAUT forum, where lots of smart and knowledgeable people look into claims just like this one.

It’s amazing how much bad thinking is out there in cyberspace. But don’t worry. Its bark is a lot worse than its byte.

Whoa.

The Big Picture does the International Space Station. Need I say more?

Actually, yeah: the picture of astronaut Karen Nyberg cracked me. But they’re all really incredible.