Blogs / Bad Astronomy

During the 10-day long voyage to the Galapagos Islands in August sponsored by the James Randi Eeducational Foundation, we took along a copy of The Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, Darwin’s diary of his ground-breaking trip 150 years ago. Some smart cookie asked all of us to sign the book, and now that autographed copy is being auctioned! It has signatures by Randi, me, PZ Myers, George Hrab, and a whole lot more. The auction winner will also get a signed photo of Randi posing next to a Galapagos tortoise.

This is a pretty cool auction, and the proceeds will go toward a scholarship to help people attend the premier critical thinking conference The Amaz!ng Meeting 7, which will be in Las Vegas on July 9-12, 2009. We’re working on the speaker line-up and it’s already looking, well, amazing. So bid on the book and help some deserving person attend the meeting!

The UK newspaper The Telegraph has an interesting slide show of their pick for the top 30 conspiracy theories. Before you ask, the Moon Hoax rated number 4.

I have not heard of many of them, and some shouldn’t even be on the list. Roswell is there, but not UFOs in general. And please, chemtrails? This is one of the lamest CTs of all time, along with crop circles. Feh. But it’s rather fun to read them all in a row. People believe funny things.

Tip o’ the tin foil beanie to James Oberg.

Obviously, I know there will be no disaster, astronomical or otherwise, in the year 2012. The conspiracy theorists are full of it, there is no Nibiru, it’ll be years after 2012 that solar activity (flares and such) will peak, and there is no alignment between the Earth and the Galactic core.

It’s all baloney.

But that doesn’t stop Hollywood! They are making a movie called, simply, 2012, and I’m sure it’ll be filled to the brim with garbage. But… a trailer just came out, and it’s cool. I can’t resist a good disaster, especially a tsunami:

I disagree with the basic plot element of the movie, too: a worldwide disaster this large would never be able to be kept secret. Something big enough to wipe out all life would be something too big to cover up, especially just four years away. An asteroid impact, global warming, some wandering planet: we’d know about anything like that years in advance (and no melting ice cap is going to cause a flood four miles high as depicted in that trailer).

So: feh.

Amanda Peet is supposed to be in this movie, which is too bad. I love her stance against antivaxxers. But I guess she has to eat too.

Tip o’ the tin foil beanie to I Watch Stuff.

I always say that (besides Earth) Saturn is the most beautiful planet in the solar system.

I may have to revise that opinion. At least in this case. It looks infected!^*

That’s a Cassini image, taken in the infrared, showing a weird aurora at the ringed planet’s north pole. We’ve been observing the aurorae on Saturn for years (I remember when we got UV images of it with Hubble, about ten years ago), but nothing like this one. In general, aurorae change shape as the magnetic field of a planet fluctuates and interacts with the Sun’s solar wind. But this one doesn’t really do that. It also has been seen to fill the entire polar region of Saturn’s equivalent of the Arctic.

In the image, light at 4 microns wavelength (roughly six times longer than the human eye can see) is blue, and light at 5 microns is in red. The latter shows warm gases deep in Saturn’s atmosphere, and you can see the usual storms and other features. Usually aurorae form a ring pattern, but you can see patches of auroral emission inside the main ring, which is unexpected.

So what’s causing this weirdness? We don’t know. There is an unusual interaction going on between the Sun’s constant wind of subatomic particles, Saturn’s magnetic field, and the atmosphere of the planet. I don’t have a clue what that could be since this isn’t my field (haha, a little magnetic joke there), but we know that the weather at Saturn’s poles is a little strange. Maybe that has something to do with it. Beats me.

I’m also sure the pseudoscientists will have a field day with this one, conjuring all up kinds of nonsense to explain this away. Their chatter will die, as it always does, when science fills the gaps in our current knowledge. Well, it will mostly die; as long as there are credulous people there will always be hucksters ready to pick their pockets.

But just look at that very odd and vaguely disturbing picture of Saturn’s boreal regions, and remember that nature is odd, nature is surprising, and nature is baffling. We still don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle… but that doesn’t mean we have to cut up what we do know to make the pieces fit. Reality will release its secrets eventually. It always does.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Sigh.

The host of one of the stupidest television shows in history - Fear Factor - turns out to be a standup comic of surprising intelligence.

Go figure.

Go figure indeed. Joe Rogan, the topic of that article, is certainly intelligent. But even smart people can fool themselves. I have to say, though, that the philosophy he espouses in the article makes some sense… except sometimes there are forces at work against which we must fight. Ignorance, willful or otherwise, is pretty high on that list.

My old friend Dan Vergano wrote an article in USA Today the other day about the irrational fears over the Large Hadron Collider. It’s a pretty good collection of the silliness that’s gone on from people who think the LHC will destroy the world (and it has a brief list of a few other fizzled doomsday scares).

It’s a pretty even-handed and rational response to the doomcriers. That’s good, because my own inclination is to mimic Brian Cox’s response.

Tip o’ the tin foil beanie to … my mom, who told me about this article.

This video is a few months old, but I just saw it at Skeptic Dad’s blog. It’s actress Amanda Peet, the anti-Jenny McCarthy, urging parents to vaccinate their kids.

She’s awesome. Nice to see some celebrities using their star-power for good.