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.

A little while back I participated in the "dot astronomy" conference; a new meeting designed to promote online astronomy. It was held in Cardiff, and oh, Doctor, how I wish I could have attended in person! But instead I skyped into the meeting and gave my 20 minute presentation on being an all-powerful blogger, capable of crushing worlds beneath me.

Or I just talked about how to set up a blog, and how it will soon dominate your life. The sound quality isn’t the best, but I think you can make out what I say. And I only ran 6 minutes long (including Q&A) so that’s pretty good, too. There are lots of other talks online (including Pamela Gay’s and Emily Lakdawalla’s), so you can spend lots of time learning about what astronomy you can do indoors and ethernetted.

Sadly, the resolution is too low to see how carefully I placed my copy of Death from the Skies! behind me. It’s just an orange blur. Sigh. What’s that? You’d like to see it better? Why, I’m glad you asked!

My thanks to Robert Simpson for getting this all set up and being patient with me.

Wanna see the coolest video set to music from a webcam attached to the very first privately owned company rocket that made it into orbit that you’ll see… well, ever?^*

Yes. Yes, you do.

Space X took the webcam video from their successful launch of the Falcon-1 rocket and set it to music. The result is made of awesome. The editing is a thing of wonder.

Hint: turn up your speakers.

And yes, you want the high-def version.

Now to go find me some Crystal Method disks…

Tip o’ the heat shield to my anonymous mole at Space X.

This is the same phrase I used to submit this to Fark, and it got greenlit! W00t!

I have always wanted to travel to Antarctica. Such beauty, such alien landscapes! I’ve had my taste of cold weather, too; I live in Colorado, after all, and have lived in Michigan.

But somehow, this video makes me less eager to head on down.

Sure, if I ever went, I’d want a flamethrower to make sure I could ward off any shape-shifting aliens trying to take over the bodies of my co-workers. But I wouldn’t have thought I’d need it just to stay warm.

We’re in a bit of a lull with Mercury right now; the MESSENGER probe passed it a few months ago, and it’ll be a little while before it makes pass #2. In the meantime, though, you can watch a video I made about the planet and the probe for SpaceRip, part of the high-res video series I’ve been doing with professional director/producer Tom Lucas.

For American viewers, it’s also up on Hulu, and it’s available through Joost as well. I think this is the best one we’ve done so far. We filmed it at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science in their Gates Planetarium. If you happen to be in the Denver area, drop by and show them some love; they’re good folks.

The other videos in the series so far are Saturn: Lord of the Rings, Black Hole Death Rays, The Changing Face of Mars, and Cookbook of Galactic Cannibalism.

Via Universe Today comes word that a video of a NASA rocket launch that went very, very awry is now on YouTube:

Yikes. Go to UT to get the details!

This is possibly a Delta launch, and not a Shuttle launch. Either way, very cool. Thanks to commenter Paolo below.

BABloggee Greg Smith pointed me toward this amateur video showing a Space Shuttle launch from an airplane window (note: mild NSFW language in the vid)!

I have to say, this looks real to me. Hard to say if it’s a Shuttle or some other rocket, but the footage itself appears legit. Normally NASA restricts the airspace around a launch, but judging from the video it looks like the airplane was 50 or more miles away from the launch site. The rocket veers away from the camera, indicating the plane was west of the launch, so that hangs together as well. Sadly, the video ends before the solid rocket boosters separate from the Shuttle (which happens roughly two minutes into the flight); that would be very telling, and I have to admit it’s weird the video doesn’t go for longer. The problem with videos like this is the lack of any real info on the hosting sites! If anyone finds more, please leave a note in the comments below.

I have seen some weird stuff from airplanes, and I carry my camera on board all the time now Just In Case. I’d dearly love to catch something like this…