Blogs / Bad Astronomy

A few weeks ago my brother-in-law took this picture:

Click to embeegen (ha!). Actually, I helped take this shot; I held the flash while he took the pictures. We were bent way over into the lavender, and the buzz of dozens of bees was quite loud and more than a little menacing.

He’s a good photographer, and one of these days we’ll set up all my meteorites to get a nice gallery of them.

I’m at Dragon*Con having fun and being skeptical, so today you get to see my cat in mood lighting.

How much Mars can you take?

One of my favorite cameras in the whole solar system, HiRISE on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, has been snapping away for a long time, taking superduper hires images of the Martian surface. The folks at HiRISE just released thousands of images of the Red Planet for your perusal… and face it, if you have time to kill reading my blog, you have time to kill looking at awesome Mars pictures.

Some are gorgeous, some are odd, and some are pure head-scratching "Whaaa?", like the one I show here of defrosting patterns near the Martian south pole. Mars is weird.

But you can find that out for yourself. Go and explore another planet!

Hey, it’s been a while since I posted a really pretty deep space picture just for the heck of it. So here you go: the magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 4945:

NGC 4945. Image Credit: ESO. Click to embiggenatrify.

Wow. This image was taken using the European Southern Observatory’s 2.2-meter MPG/ESO telescope in La Silla, Chile. The picture uses five filters: three to mimic what the eye sees (red, green, and blue) plus two more which let through light emitted by hydrogen and sulfur. Those last two filters emphasize light given off in giant gas clouds that are actively forming stars. You can see that in the image as the streaks of pinkish light around the edge of the galaxy.

But there’s more going on here than meets the eye…

NGC 4945 is about 13 million light years away in the constellation of Centaurus. All the stars you see in the image are in our own Milky Way galaxy; it’s a little bit like looking through a dirty window at an object outside. Looking in this direction means looking right through a local spiral arm of the Milky Way, so we see lots of foreground stars interfering with our view… but it makes the image prettier.

This galaxy is an interesting one to study. First, it’s a lot like the Milky Way, a spiral galaxy with hundreds of billions of stars. Second, it’s close to us, making it easy to study. We have a great view of it! To give you a sense of scale, the full Moon would just fit in this image, so we really can see very fine detail in the galaxy. In fact, a search of the professional journal papers indicates it’s one of the most studied galaxies in the sky.

Even better, NGC 4945 is an active galaxy, meaning it’s shooting high-energy light and matter out of its nucleus. You can’t tell in this picture because there are thousands of light years of gas and dust inside the galaxy blocking our visible-light view of the center. But X-rays, for example, slice right through all that junk, and in fact NGC 4945 is one of the brightest extragalactic X-ray sources in the sky. Even cooler, radio observations of the core of the galaxy reveal it has a ring of intense star formation occurring just 160 light years from the galactic nucleus!

That’s incredible, because the fact that NGC 4945 is active means it has a supermassive black hole at its core which is busily gobbling down matter at an atrocious rate. It doesn’t seem at first blush like the best environment to make new stars… but you need to drill down a bit here. Matter spiraling down into a black hole heats up monstrously due to friction, magnetism, and other forces, and a wind of subatomic particles can blast out from the material. If there is an abundance of gas and dust near the center of the galaxy — and radio observations indicate there is — then this wind slams into that material, compressing and collapsing it, forming stars.

Think for a moment on that: in the deepest hearts of galaxies, sometimes the place where matter goes to die — and directly because that matter is disappearing for ostensibly forever — is also where new stars are born.

I don’t believe there is a driving force to this Universe, no guidance or hand at the wheel… but it still gets to me sometimes, just how poetic a cosmos it is that we live in.

The very talented astrophotographer Ralf Vandebergh has done it again! He’s captured an astonishing view of the International Space Station:

Wow. You may remember Ralf’s earlier ISS shot, or when he caught an astronaut doing an EVA.

This image was taken on August 29, before the current Discovery mission, and shows the station gleaming in sunlight. On the right he has helpfully pointed out the Japanese Experiment Module, named Kibo. It consists of a pressurized module as well as a platform outside, exposed to space. The Exposed Facility was brought up to ISS in late July 2009 by Endeavour, and is the newest addition to the station.

[UPDATE! Ralf just sent me another great shot, this one taken after the Shuttle launch, as Discovery approached the station. The Orbiter is not in the same field of view as ISS so he added it to the ISS picture as an inset:

Pretty cool, huh?]

Mind you, this shot was taken with a 10 inch telescope, which is considered small-to-moderate in size these days. Even more amazing, Ralf manually tracks the telescope while taking pictures of the station! No fancy computers autoguiding or anything like that. Just good old-fashioned steady hands and lots and lots of practice.

Congrats to Ralf for another incredible shot!

OMFSM. I love this picture. Love love love.

Love.

[Click to embiggen.]

Is it a ring of fire on Mercury? A look into the gateway of hell? A promo for Halo 3?

Nope. It’s far cooler: it’s the rim of the lunar crater Erlanger poking into the sunlight.

Erlanger sits almost at the Moon’s pole, lying at a latitude of 87° north. At that latitude, the Sun is forever near the horizon, only getting a little above or below the limb depending on the Moon’s orbit around the Earth. In this case most of the crater is not lit by the Sun, but the raised rim gets up just high enough to see some sunlight, illuminating it in this wonderful way. Note the small patch of lunar surface to the lower left of the picture that’s in sunlight as well. That’s another indicator that how much sunlight you get at the Moon’s poles depends a whole lot on the local topography of the terrain. Um. Selain? Lunain? Whatever.

Anyway, in this shot by the fantabulous Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, you can see that the rim of the crater has seen its share of action; it’s dotted with smaller craters from later, smaller impacts. That part of the Moon is lousy with craters; it’s an old region, meaning that the pelting it got from cosmic debris billions of years ago is still visible. On other areas of the Moon, like the dark patches you can see with your unaided eye, giant impacts flooded vast regions of the surface with lava, filling up and smoothing over any craters, wiping them off the face of the Moon. That never happened near the pole, so Erlanger still stands high and proud.

But it also runs deep: the bottom of the crater is low enough to rarely get sunlight. Scientists think that ice from comet impacts over the eons may accumulate in such deep craters, so Erlanger is a prime target for LRO’s bistatic radar, which can penetrate into the lunar surface and reflect back to the probe. The type of reflection can indicate what materials lie beneath… including frozen water. LRO and the Indian probe Chandrayaan-1 just targeted Erlanger last week for such an observation.

Will they find water? We don’t know yet. But we’re still looking, and in fact the other half of the LRO mission is LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite; follow it on Twitter!), which will impact the lunar surface near the pole on October 9th of this year. The hope is that any water will be flung up into space where it will be more easily detectable. This has been tried before, but so far we’ve seen no water on the Moon.

But maybe this next time we’ll strike transparent gold. And if we do, I wonder… is there a child already alive on Earth today who may one day drink Erlanger water as they sit on Armstrong Base, admiring the view of the lunar landscape out the mess hall window?

Holy. Haleakala.

I need not explain what planet that is. Click to massively embiggen.

It’s the first full-disk image of the Earth from the GOES 14 satellite, launched in June of 2009. The image was taken on July 27, from a distance of about 36,000 km (22,000 miles). It’s a visible light image, so pretty much what you get is what you see. The resolution of the data is about 1 km (0.6 miles). Wow.

The GOES satellites (there are three others flying at the moment) track dangerous weather such as hurricanes, and can save millions of dollars and hundreds of lives. They are run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and are a great example of how space exploration and your tax dollars can be put to good use.

And man, it makes a very fine picture too, doesn’t it? There’s no place like home.

Tip o’ the rain hat to Fark.