Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Reminder: Wil Wheaton will be on The Big Bang Theory tonight! I don’t know if I’ll be able to watch tonight since I’m traveling, but I’m hoping.
And folks: if you comment below, PLEASE DON’T POST SPOILERS. Mmmmkay?

A lot of people sent me notes via email and Twitter saying they were out watching the Shuttle and the ISS pass by in the sky last night when Discovery did something very odd and disturbing: there was a flash and then an expanding halo of light around the Shuttle.

My first thought when I read this was that it was an orbital maneuver — a rocket firing — or maybe a meteor coincidentally near the same spot in the sky, but it turns out to be neither: it was a waste liquid dump, when the astronauts empty waste tanks before landing the Orbiter. SpaceWeather.com has the details, including a very cool picture.

I was out last night twice to see Discovery and the ISS, but didn’t see the Orbiter either time (I think the predictions I was using were off due to the imminent landing), so I missed the show. Oh well. I imagine more pictures will turn up pretty soon, though, so keep your eyes open.

Discovery has a landing opportunity at 19:05 Eastern time (23:05 GMT) today — they’ll make the de-orbit burn at 17:59 if the weather holds up — and then another opportunity about 90 minutes later at 20:42 (00:42 GMT) if needed. As usual, I’ll be tweeting it as it happens.

On Tuesday, June 23 (tomorrow!), I’ll be in DC to talk about how the internet and social networks have changed the way we communicate science. The cool thing is, the talk will be at the very prestigious National Academy of Sciences!

The NAS has always been interested in science communication, but the advent of teh toobz has obviously changed the game. A lot of voices advocating reality are rising now that were unheard before, and the web is their (our!) medium. So they asked me to come and talk about this to the staff, and, even better they’ve opened this to the public. Matt Nisbet has scheduling details; my talk is at 12:30 – 1:30 at the NAS building (500 Fifth Street, N.W. DC).

It’s RSVP only, so if you are in the area and want to attend, contact Olive Schwarzschild at oschwarz "at" nas "dot" edu.

I am now covering the Shuttle launch live on Twitter using my BA News feed. Launch is scheduled for 14:01 Eastern time (18:01 GMT) today! You can also watch on NASA TV.

I don’t usually put personal stuff on this blog for a lot of different reasons, but today is a rare exception.

You see, today is my mom’s 80^th birthday.

She’s been a huge influence on me. Of course, your parents are supposed to be, for better or worse, but in this case I’m going with better. My parents were really great about encouraging my siblings and me to pursue the lives we wanted (including letting me keep my giant 10″ Newtonian telescope in the corner of the living room for years — visitors thought it was a water heater), and that resulted in all of us going after unusual or non-standard careers. And, come to think of it, all of us have made major career changes at some point in our lives; I consider that to be a positive aspect since it meant we were unsatisfied with the way things were going and, rather than settle, we went off in new directions to find what it was we wanted.

My oldest brother is an electrical engineer has a degree in computer science and now runs a computer and networking consultant business in Atlanta. My other brother’s the chief engineer for construction in a Maryland county public school system. My sister has a Masters degree in music and sang opera, for criminy’s sake! And me, I’ve had a handful of weird careers myself. Writing stuff while wearing pajamas may be the most mainstream of them.

So my brothers and sister owe a lot to my mom. I know she reads this blog (though the fire-eating and tattooing and gun-shooting stuff may have her reading this from behind the couch), and I also know she would love it if everyone here sent their best wishes to her.

Happy birthday, Mom.

The Space Shuttle Discovery is due to touch down in Florida at 13:43 Eastern time Saturday! As usual, I’ll try to live Tweet it (on my new BA News account). The mission was pretty successful, with the installation of a new truss and solar panels that has given the Space Station full power capacity, as well as bringing up a new crew member and taking one away. The one big glitch was a pin installed upside-down in an equipment platform, which NASA hopes to get fixed soon.

Remember, you can watch the landing on NASA TV (and if you have it, the cable station HDNet commonly shows them live in HD too).

In other Shuttle news, Atlantis rolls out to the pad Tuesday! When it launches (scheduled for May 12) it’ll be heading to perform the last servicing mission on the Hubble Space Telescope.

I am getting swamped with notes from folks saying that the new node to be put on ISS next year will be named "Colbert".

But it’s not that simple.

As you may recall, NASA opened up a contest to name Node 3, a connecting module to be put on the International Space Station next February. The name "Serenity" (awesome!) was doing very well, and then my arch-enemy Stephen Colbert started asking his Nation to send in votes.

Next thing you know, there were 230,000 votes for "Colbert", 40,000 more than for "Serenity". But this is not over, because NASA was smart in the original contest. Check out Contest Rule #4:

NASA will take into consideration the results of the voting. However, the results are not binding on NASA and NASA reserves the right to ultimately select a name in accordance with the best interests of the agency, its needs, and other considerations. Such name may not necessarily be one which is on the list of voted-on candidate names. NASA’s decision shall be deemed final.

I’ll watch Colbert tonight, and I’m sure he’ll claim victory. But that clause means NASA doesn’t have to use the winning entry! Of course, it would be smart in a PR way for NASA to name it "Colbert" — and even if they don’t, I just bet the astronauts will, informally — but we’ll see. I’m still holding out for the right choice. After all, like the man said, you treat her proper, she’ll be with you for the rest of your life.

Serenity logo courtesy collinrego’s Flickr photostream.