I suddenly realized I never put my photos up from Dragon*Con a few weeks ago, so I’ve corrected that oversight.

Those pictures are just a taste of how much fun I had. If you’re an old school Doctor Who fan, then check this out:

That’s me with Sylvester McCoy, the Seventh Doctor! We chatted for a few minutes backstage before the Paul and Storm/Jonathan Coulton/Molly Lewis concert. I only got to see the first few minutes of the music because I had a panel at the same time and had to run. But Doctor McCoy (see what I did there?) was great. I was on a panel — really, a goofy quiz show that was uproarious and maybe a little naughty — with him the next night (and Doc Hammer from Venture Brothers; here’s proof) and it was awesome.

In fact, I’ll admit I felt like an A-list geek the whole con. It was amazing and gratifying and wonderful. I have been a fanboy my whole life; I went to science fiction cons when I was in high school and doted over my favorite authors. I stopped going for a long time, but then started back up again a few years ago, and now they’re magical all over again. It’s incredible to me that I not only get to meet so many people I truly admire, but that I also get to call them friends.

My thanks to Rain Glynn, Derek Colanduno, Ken Plume, and everyone else who made this con so much fun. Special thanks to Jennifer Teeter and Jason Thomas from Red Rocket Farm for giving me a rocket painting and other adorable swag. His art is terrific, and you should check out their t-shirts.

So yeah, Dragon*Con was made of win. I can’t wait to go back next year!

If there’s a bright center to the Universe, astronomers have found the planet it’s farthest from. Called Kepler-16b, it’s a Saturn-like world which has the distinction of being the first discovered to orbit both Sun-like stars in a binary system.

OK, Star Wars references aside, this is pretty cool. Most of the planets being found around other stars are orbiting single stars. A very few — like a possible planet orbiting Gamma Cephei — orbit one of the stars in a binary system, and some (like NN Serpentis b and c) orbit both stars, but one of them is a dead star like a white dwarf or a neutron star.

Unlike those, Kepler-16 is a binary where both stars, though dinky, are bona-fide stars like the Sun, and the planet orbits both. Actually, how it was found is pretty nifty. The orbiting Kepler observatory is designed to stare at over 100,000 stars and detect the tell-tale drop in light when a planet transits (that is, from our point of view passes directly in front of) its parent star. Kepler has found a lot of planet candidates this way — well over 1200!

Kepler-16 is one (OK, two) of those stars (hence the name), located about 200 light years from Earth. The two stars are eclipsing binaries, meaning that we are viewing them from Earth in the plane of their orbit. Twice every orbital period, one of the stars blocks the light from the other and we see the total light from the system dip a little bit. We know of a lot of eclipsing binaries, and their properties are pretty well understood.

But Kepler-16 is different. (more…)

I’ve just learned that all three episodes of my TV show, "Phil Plait’s Bad Universe", will air in the UK on DiscoveryUK from August 15th through the 17th. The air times vary, so check the link to find out when it’s playing.

Sky TV has clips online to give you a taste of the three episodes: Asteroid Apocalypse , Alien Attack, and Death Stars. If you sense a theme, well, read the title of the show again.

Hope you like ‘em!

And by the way, the DVD set is available on the Discovery Channel store and at other online venues like Amazon.

[I suppose this post has a PG-13 rating. Not for language or nudity, but for what may be a (humorously) disturbing image for some folks. Be ye fairly warned, says I.]

So the European Southern Observatory took the Very Large Telescope, pointed it at NGC 1929 — a cluster of stars 180,000 light years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud — and got this amazing picture:

[Click to ennebulenate, or grab the huger 1780 x 1780 pixel version.]

I was all set to talk about how this huge bubble — over 300 light years across! — is being blown into the gas surrounding the cluster by the combined mighty winds of the stars inside it, young massive stars that live short, violent lives that end in short, violent deaths, and how this will compress the gas further and induce even more star formation, but how in the meantime they’re flooding the gas with powerful ultraviolet radiation that’s lighting up the gas precisely like a neon sign, and how amazingly detailed this image is despite the cluster and gas being in another galaxy at a distance of nearly 2 quintillion kilometers…

(more…)

I somehow totally missed the fact that the mid-season premier of Doctor Who will be August 27, in just three weeks! Yay!

Still, for us squeeing Whovians, that seems like ages. So why not fill this long, dark tea-time of the soul by looking over Bob Canada’s cheeky Doctor Who infographic? It’s pretty good, and has some solid stuff in it for newbies and Who veterans alike. He also has one for the 1960s and 70s era villains, too.

As for the premier, I’ve been trying to avoid spoilers as much as possible — I haven’t even watched the trailer for the next series. The past two series have opened up a lot of questions that remain unsolved, but I’ve been a Steven Moffat fan for a long time (have you watched the adult sitcom "Coupling"? Brilliant!) so I know patience will pay off.

BTW, Buzzfeed has a great gallery of Doctor Who graffiti too. And of course, there’s also this from your humble host.

Carl Sagan revolutionized popular astronomy with his book and TV show "Cosmos", which had an audience of hundreds of millions of people. We’ve learned a lot about our Universe since then, and we’re overdue for a modern version of Sagan’s show. So I’m pleased to find out that Neil Tyson will be hosting a revamped and updated version of "Cosmos"!

He’s working with Ann Druyan (Sagan’s widow and herself a science popularizer), Steve Soter (who also worked on the original show), and Seth MacFarlane, creator of "Family Guy". I know, that may sound weird, but MacFarlane is a big science fan, a friend of Neil’s, and commonly puts a lot of science into his shows.

The new show is being created by National Geographic and Fox, and will air on the latter in prime time. To circumvent the expected comments on this, note that Fox News is separate from Fox TV, so the irony is there but perhaps not as strong as you might think.

I’m looking forward to this new show. "Cosmos" had a profound effect on hundreds of millions of people, but times have changed. I’ll be curious to see how they update the look and feel of the program for the modern audience.

Image credit: Wikipedia

I’ve been hearing rumors about an end-of-the-world movie called "Melancholia", and I finally stumbled on a trailer for it:

It looks pretty interesting. Without too many spoilers — it’s in the trailer, after all — the doomsday is caused by a planet approaching the Earth, and we hear someone say it was hidden behind the Sun.

Now, I’ll say that’s not really possible. A planet falling in from deep space and approaching us close enough to harm us would be visible for decades, and since the Earth circles the Sun once per year there’s no way the Sun could hide it for very long — if the Sun were hiding it in April, for example, by November it would be high in the night sky and visible to everyone. At first I interpreted the line to mean it was orbiting the Sun on the opposite side of our orbit, but that doesn’t work either; a planet big enough to hurt us would have revealed itself through its gravitational influence on other planets long before now (Gerry and Sylvia Anderson did a movie in the 60s based on this called "Journey to the Far Side of the Sun", in fact).

But that doesn’t matter. What good science fiction does is take a concept and see how it affects things, and in this case I’ll take a rogue planet as the plot device. "Melancholia" looks like a lovely movie, and I imagine I’ll watch it when it’s finally released in November.

Incidentally, a different movie called "Another Earth" will be coming out in a couple of weeks, but it’s also about a planet that appears in the sky, and also seems to be thoughtful and interesting. The trailer is on YouTube.