Bad Astronomy

Mars craters are sublime

Phil Plait — Thu, 24 May 2012 13:00:46 +0000

Someday, Mars will stop surprising me.

Today is not that day.

The image below was taken by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been taking devastatingly high-res pictures of the Red Planet for many years. While passing over the edge of the Tharsis Shield — a huge uplifted region of Mars home to its four gigantic volcanoes –it saw this bizarre fieldof craters:

[Click to hephaestenate.]

First, you may think these are mounds and not craters, but that’s an illusion. Our brain uses illumination to gauge up and down in pictures like these, and assumes the sunlight is coming from above. However, these really are craters, but the illumination is coming from below — north is roughly toward the top of the picture and the crater field is at a northern latitude of about 50°. Flip the picture over if it helps (I’ll be honest, even doing that makes it hard for me to see these as other than mounds; confounded brain!). You can see more examples of this illusion here, here, and here.

But that’s not the weirdest thing about these ...

OK, one more eclipse shot

Phil Plait — Wed, 23 May 2012 19:28:55 +0000

I’ve posted a lot of stuff about Sunday’s annular eclipse (see Related Links below), and I figured I was done… but then I got a pretty remarkable picture sent to me.

During the eclipse, in northern California, two men sent a small (6 cubic meter) helium-filled balloon up to 90,000 feet (roughly 27 km). Equipped with a camera and an ingenious system that used puffs of gas to orient the payload, they took this pretty amazing shot of the eclipse:

[Click to penumbrenate.]

That’s the Earth on the left (duh), and on the upper right you can see the eclipsed Sun! They used a solar filter to cover half the camera’s view so that they could get the correct exposure for both the Earth and the much brighter Sun.

I really enjoyed reading their story on how they set this up and executed it. I especially liked how they launched, sat around to watch the eclipse itself, then set off to find the balloon once it came back down (shredded after it popped at its lofty apex).

I ...

Cateidolia

Phil Plait — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:41:01 +0000

Via my pal Miss Cellania (possibly not her real name) at Neatorama, I saw this short cat video which is really pretty funny:

Ha! This is a great example of audio pareidolia; hearing (instead of seeing, as it’s usually done) some recognizable pattern in a completely unrelated series of noises. It helps a lot if you’re cued in some way to hear it with subtitles. In this case the title of the Neatorama post had me listening for the words "I don’t want to", but I think I would’ve heard it anyway.

But I wonder: if they were going to a dispensary and asked the cat what they were getting, would you hear "marijuana"?

Check out the posts below for more of this sort of thing. The first one still makes me laugh.

Related Posts:

- It’s Caturday? NONONONO.
- Ba? Fa!
- The hallmark of a black hole
- Carmina Buraneidolia

Saturn, surreally

Phil Plait — Wed, 23 May 2012 13:00:55 +0000

Take 7+ years of Saturn observations by the Cassini spacecraft, stitch a whole lot of them together into short, film-noir-like segments, and add a Beethoven soundtrack. What do you get? Awesomeness.

The video was put together by Nahum Chazarra, who says on Twitter he’s a "Geology student, science lover". There’s literally too much in this to describe! Moons, rings, the planet itself… but I think my favorite part is when some object, usually a tiny moon, stays centered while the rings and planet and other objects wheel around it. It’s a change-of-perspective effect, but amazing to watch. And you really can’t go wrong with "Moonlight Sonata".

Something like this video has been done before (specifically here and here, and both are well, well worth your time to watch) but to be honest it’s impossible to get too much of this. The changing lighting and exposure, the sometimes jerky apparent motion (due to the inconstant times between exposures combined with the spacecraft’s motion), and the simply jaw-dropping spectacle of the ridiculously gaudy Saturnian system, all combine to make this an engaging and even mesmerizing show.

Tip o’ the dew shield to ...

SpaceX Dragon on its way to the ISS!

Phil Plait — Tue, 22 May 2012 17:19:42 +0000

At 07:44 UTC, May 22, 2012, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket thundered into space, carrying the Dragon capsule into orbit.

So first, holy wow, and yay! That’s fantastic news! This was the second attempt, after a glitchy valve caused a launch abort a few days ago.

This morning’s launch went very smoothly. After achieving orbit, the uncrewed Dragon craft decoupled from the rocket and successfully deployed its solar panels, a key milestone in the mission. When that happened, the cheering from the SpaceX team could be heard in the webcast background, which was delightful. A lot of people on Twitter commented on how NASA’s narration of the event was very stoic and calm, but the SpaceX webcast was very emotional and involved*. I think both of those are as they should be!

Here’s a short video of the launch:

The entire SpaceX webcast is also online. The key moments are the launch at 44:30 into the video, main engine cutoff and start of the second stage at 47:30, the rocket achieving orbit and Dragon capsule separation

A fake and a real view of the solar eclipse… FROM SPACE!

Phil Plait — Tue, 22 May 2012 13:00:57 +0000

[First: CONGRATS to SpaceX for the successful launch of the Falcon 9 and deployment of the Dragon capsule! Everything looked great and things are apparently going smoothly. You can watch the whole thing here, and I'll have more about all this in a little while. Until then, back to your regularly scheduled blog post.]

Over the past couple of days, a lot of people are passing this image around, saying it’s from the eclipse Sunday, taken by an astronaut from the International Space Station:

Here’s the thing: it’s not. It’s actually a lovely piece of artwork done in 2009 by a Japanese artist who goes by the name A4size-ska on DeviantArt.

There are plenty of clues to show it’s not real, if you know where to look. For one, the real eclipse was annular, meaning a lot of the Sun was still seen around the silhouetted Moon. That’s not apparent here. Plus, the bright Earth (and Sun!) would wash out the background stars in a picture like this, so you’d not see them, and certainly not the Milky Way (the fuzzy band under the eclipse in the ...

Gallery: When the Moon ate (most of) the Sun

Phil Plait — Mon, 21 May 2012 15:15:46 +0000
Click here to view gallery

The May 20, 2012 annular solar eclipse in motion

Phil Plait — Mon, 21 May 2012 12:30:59 +0000

So yesterday was the annular eclipse of the Sun, and I held a live impromptu video chat on Google+ about it. I was joined by Pamela Gay, Fraser Cain, Nicole Gugliucci, and Jason Major, and we had a live video feed using astronomer Scott Lewis’s telescope. It was way too much fun! I’ve embedded the video at the bottom of this post.

We asked for pictures, and my Twitter feed overfloweth with them! I’m collecting them to put into a gallery which I’ll have up soon, but until then, watch this incredible video taken by John Knoll in his front yard in northern California:

Isn’t that amazing? What happened is that all the overlapping leaves made thousands of tiny holes that sunlight could poke through. This acts like a lens, focusing images of the Sun through every hole — it’s how a pinhole camera works. [UPDATE: Timothy in the comments below points out that some people were confused by my wording. I can see why; I had started to explain how a pinhole camera works then decided it was too distracting and instead just linked ...

LIVE Q&BA Hangout for the eclipse

Phil Plait — Sun, 20 May 2012 22:39:00 +0000

[UPDATE: The hangout's over. Thanks to all who watched! I'll have the YouTube video up as soon as I can!]

I know this is last minute, but I decided to do a live Hangout on Google+ to talk about the solar eclipse. I’ve embedded the video below if you want to watch. If you want to ask questions, go to the link above or send me something on Twitter. If you leave a comment here I won’t see it!

Eclipse followup part 2: tons o’ links on how to safely watch

Phil Plait — Sun, 20 May 2012 16:45:32 +0000

Today’s the eclipse! I’m excited, though our weather here in Boulder has been fairly touch-and-go the past few weeks. I’m hoping for clear skies so I can see it; I got my eclipse glasses in the mail yesterday, so I’m all set. Locally, CU Boulder is holding a viewing in the football stadium! That’s a pretty nifty idea. As a reminder, the eclipse begins at 20:56 UTC (13:56 Pacific US time) on May 20, and ends at 02:49 UTC May 21 (19:49 on May 20 Pacific time).

I have links in an earlier post on where and when to watch (and yesterday I posted about why the "Supermoon" two weeks ago guarantees today’s eclipse being annular).

Observing the Sun during an eclipse can be tricky, since it’s very bright and can damage your eyes. Wikipedia has an excellent article about this. Something I want to make special note of: during the deepest eclipse, when the Sun is blocked the most, is ironically the most dangerous time to look at it with your unaided eye. Your pupil dilates (opens wide), letting in more light, but the parts of the Sun not ...

Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe (of asteroid mining and Mayans)

Phil Plait — Sun, 20 May 2012 13:00:15 +0000

As a change of pace, I was the guest rogue on this week’s episode of The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. We covered a lot of ground, from Futurama heads to asteroid mining to Mayans… and I have an abysmal record at the Science or Fiction segment when I’m on the show, so you can hold your breath in anticipation to see if I finally get one right, or once again go down in flames. I’ll note, obviously, that I always get it right when I listen to the show at home.

And nothing says love like Rebecca promising she’d freeze my head. Such a romantic.

SpaceX launch aborted; next attempt Tuesday

Phil Plait — Sat, 19 May 2012 17:20:15 +0000

The launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 this morning was aborted at literally the last second — the sensors detected too high a pressure in a combustion chamber in one of the engines. Apparently this didn’t put the rocket in any danger, but it was outside the limits for an allowable launch so the computer shut things down.

[UPDATE: SpaceX is reporting a faulty valve caused the issue, and it's being replaced. They should be ready for the Tuesday launch window.]

Here’s video of the last few seconds of the countdown.

Ouch. My thoughts on this are pretty clear: it’s a bummer, but then again that’s all it is. Not a disaster, not a failure, just a setback. These are complicated, complex machines, and delays are inevitable.

The good news is there’s a backup launch date of Tuesday, May 22, at 07:44 UTC (03:44 Eastern US time), and another the next day, May 23, at 07:22 UTC. Hopefully, this glitch can be fixed and the rocket launched on one of those dates.

Related Posts:

- Space X set to launch on Saturday May 19
- Elon Musk of SpaceX on CBS’s 60 Minutes
- SpaceX ...

Followup: Supereclipse

Phil Plait — Sat, 19 May 2012 13:00:01 +0000

I wrote earlier about the annular eclipse happening this coming Sunday. It’s a solar eclipse, with the Moon blocking the Sun, but because the Moon is at apogee — the point in its orbit farthest from Earth — the Moon appears smaller in the sky, so it doesn’t completely block the Sun. We’re left with a ring of solar surface surrounding the Moon, the so-called Ring of Fire.

I got a couple of people asking me why this eclipse is happening at lunar apogee when we just had a "Supermoon", when the Moon was full at perigee (when it’s closest to Earth in its orbit). This is a good question! It’s not a coincidence. In fact, it must happen this way! Here’s why.

First, here’s a drawing of the Moon’s orbit, courtesy NASA:

The Moon orbits the Earth in an ellipse, so sometimes it’s closer to us, and sometimes farther. The ellipticity is exaggerated in the drawing; it’s actually about a 10% difference in distance between apogee and perigee. The Moon orbits the Earth once every 27.3 days, so ...

Don’t forget the Space X launch!

Phil Plait — Fri, 18 May 2012 20:24:58 +0000

Space X is looking good to launch its Falcon 9 + Dragon capsule on Saturday morning at 08:55 UTC (04:55 Eastern US time). NASA tweeted about it, saying there’s a 70% chance of good weather at that time. It’s Florida, so that can change in an instant. Check with NASA and Space X for updates.

Space X put together a press kit with details on the launch and mission activities. Via Universe Today I saw this nice video with a great CGI animation of what will happen:

It’s actually a couple of years old, but still fun to watch. NASA TV will be carrying the launch live, as will Space X, and Elon Musk — CEO of Space X– will be live-tweeting it.

Andromeda’s majestic spray of billions of hot stars

Phil Plait — Fri, 18 May 2012 17:33:00 +0000

Well, what can I say about this devastating and jaw-dropping picture of our nearest spiral neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy?

[Click to massive chainedmaidenate. Do it!]

Well, I could start with HOLY HALEAKALA!

This image is a collection of 11 separate observations of Andromeda taken by NASA’s GALEX satellite. Launched in 2003, GALEX (which stands for Galaxy Evolution Explorer) scans the sky in ultraviolet light, specifically targeting galaxies. Hot stars produce UV light, and so does the gas it illuminates, so by looking in the ultraviolet astronomers can learn about how galaxies are constructed. In the decade since its launch, GALEX has been phenomenally successful, cataloging hundreds of millions of galaxies, some as far as ten billion light years away!

This image of Andromeda is simply stunning. It’s comprised of two colors: what you see here as blue is higher-energy ultraviolet light, and red is lower energy (closer to the kind of light we see). Right away you can see that objects emitting the higher-energy UV are confined to the spiral arms, and lower-energy emitters are spread out across the galaxy. That’s exactly what I would expect: massive stars, the kind that really blast out UV, ...

The closest supernova candidate?

Phil Plait — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:00:51 +0000

[NOTE: Whenever I write about actual cosmic events that might possibly affect us on Earth, I get scared emails from some folks. So let me be up front: there are no stars close enough to Earth to hurt us should they explode. Nothing I write in this post changes that; I'm talking about a star that can go supernova that's closer than I thought any was, but still much too far away to do much to us. So don't panic. But do please enjoy the over-the-topness of what happens when a star explodes. Because it's cool.]

Back in January I started writing what I call BAFacts; daily snippets of astronomy factoids. I post them on Twitter and Google+, and I keep an archive of them on the blog, too.

On May 13 I tweeted this one: BAFact: A supernova has to be less than about 75 light years away to hurt us. No star that close can explode, so we’re OK. The distance may actually be somewhere between 50 – 100 light years, and it depends on the kind of exploding star, but I have to keep these factoids to about 110 characters to tweet them. Nuance is ...

As promised: Jupiter and moons seen by SOHO

Phil Plait — Thu, 17 May 2012 19:56:45 +0000

A little while back, I wrote about Jupiter appearing in an image from NASA’s SOHO Sun-observing satellite. I promised that it would soon appear in a SOHO camera that had higher magnification, and we’d be able to see its moons.

I am not one to break promises:

Awesome. It helps to set the resolution to 720p to see the moons when they’re pointed out.

And just you wait: in early June, Venus will appear in the LASCO C3 and C2 cameras, on its way for a date transiting the Sun for the last time in over a century. I’ll have more about that event in a few days… I promise!

Tip o’ the occulting bar to SungrazerComets on Twitter.

Related Posts:

- Jupiter, acting all superior
- Lovejoy lives!
- The Sun fries a comet and we got to watch
- The Galilean Revolution, 400 years later

Ring of fire eclipse on May 20

Phil Plait — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:49:13 +0000

On Sunday, May 20, the Moon will pass between the Earth and the Sun, creating a solar eclipse.

However, this isn’t your usual event: because the Moon will be at apogee (the farthest point in its orbit), it won’t completely cover the face of the Sun. Instead of the Sun being totally blocked and the ethereal glow of its corona visible, we’ll see an annular eclipse, also called a "Ring of Fire" eclipse. The picture here — from the October 2005 annular eclipse — makes it clear why!

The eclipse begins at 20:56 UTC (16:56 Eastern US time) on May 20, and ends at 02:49 UTC May 21 (22:49 on May 20 Eastern time). Folks on the east coast of the US will not see the entire eclipse (for those on the extreme east coast, the Sun sets before the eclipse starts for that location [UPDATE: here's a good map to show you if you can see it or not, from the AstroGuyz site]), whereas people on the west coast will barely see the whole thing. For me, in Boulder, Colorado, the Sun ...

I was into astronomy when it was still astrology

Phil Plait — Thu, 17 May 2012 13:00:06 +0000

One of the things I love about the internet, and specifically Twitter, is how an offhand comment turns into awesome. And it happens within seconds.

For some reason, a super-hi-res picture of the Earth is making the rounds right now. It’s a gorgeous pic, and lots of people are sending me the link via email and Twitter. The thing is, I wrote about this picture back in April, on Earth Day. But such is the nature of the interwebz that stuff pops back up.

I appreciate that folks think enough of me to send me stuff, in case I hadn’t seen it. But in this case I figured I’d better stem the tide, so I tweeted about it, just basically saying thanks, but I already wrote about it.

Right after tweeting that, I realized how hipster it sounded. So I decided to go full hipster, tweeting:

It says, "I wrote about the Earth, it’s an obscure planet, you’ve probably never heard of it. #BadAstrohipster". I added the #BadAstrohipster hashtag as an afterthought; hashtags were originally meant to be used as a way to organize and categorize tweets, but now most ...

Science Getaways: T- 4 months

Phil Plait — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:34:03 +0000

Science Getaways is a company my wife and I started so that science enthusiasts (and you better face it, since you’re reading this, that’s you) can go on a vacation that has extra science added. For me, science isn’t a career or a hobby — it’s a lifestyle. I can’t get enough, even on vacation, so we figured why not put together vacation deals that have bonus value-added science?

The first Getaway is September 16 – 20 of this year, and it’ll be at the C Lazy U ranch, an all-inclusive luxury ranch in the Rocky Mountains. We visited there last year and it’s incredibly beautiful. The views are spectacular, and you’re really out in the middle of nature there.

Which brings up a funny coincidence. This morning I was going through some photos I took, and stumbled on one I took last year when I was up in Rocky Mountain National Park filming a science documentary. When we finished shooting we packed up the gear and headed down the path to the van. As we made that long walk, I looked over to my right and was pretty surprised to see this:

Prairie Light: Alberta Aurora

Phil Plait — Wed, 16 May 2012 16:57:18 +0000

Every now and again my work piles up and I can feel that edge of panic start to set in.

Then I saw a video and my brain let out a nice long sigh (brains are remarkable that way): Alberta Aurora – Prairie Light, a lovely time lapse that has better-than-usual resolution and color, taken as the April 23/24 solar storm swept over the Earth.

What you see in an aurora depends in part on the angle of the Earth’s magnetic field relative to the air; the geomagnetic field guides particles from the Sun’s outbursts into our atmosphere. If you are seeing this from far enough away, you get those sheets and ribbons, the interaction seen from the side. But at 1:50 into the video the perspective changes. The camera is underneath the point where the particles are streaming in, so you’re looking up, right into the barrel of the magnetic field. It’s a remarkable change in view that must be awesome to see in person.

I’ve never seen a full-on aurora, but some day I will. I hope it’s as pretty as this one was.

Related Posts:

- The green fire of the aurora, seen ...

The long reach of the Centaur’s dark heart

Phil Plait — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:21:28 +0000

Every now again I get surprised by a photo, showing me something I didn’t know about. And I love it even more when that surprise is from an object I thought I knew!

So check out this incredible image of the nearby galaxy Centaurus A, a nearby galaxy harboring a whole slew of surprises:

[Click to galactinate, or get the 4000 x 4000 pixel version, or, if you're feeling frisky, cram this onto your hard drive: an image that's 8500 x 8400 pixels and 29 Mb in size! And trust me: you want to.]

Isn’t that stunning? This picture was taken by the MPG/ESO 2.2 meter telescope in Chile, and once you get over its beauty you’ll realize this galaxy is, frankly, seriously messed up.

Cen A is about 12 million light years away and has roughly the same mass as our Milky Way, containing a few hundred billion stars. The underlying glow of those stars is what makes that round background fuzz in the image, and takes on the familiar elliptical shape of many such galaxies. [Note: All the individual stars you see here are in our on galaxy, since we're inside ...

Big Picture Science: Antivaxxers (and updates)

Phil Plait — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:15:01 +0000

I do a roughly monthly segment with astronomer Seth Shostak on Big Picture Science, a radio show/podcast done by The SETI Institute. This month, Seth and I talked about the American Airlines dustup when they were planning to run an interview with reality-impaired antivaxxer Meryl Dorey. This story is a great victory for reality, and I’ve already written about the back story.

Never forget: this antivax issue is more than important: it is literally life and death. Because of lowering vaccine rates, pertussis outbreaks are so prevalent health officials in the state of Washington have declared it to be an epidemic. The governor has had to dip into emergency funds to the tune of $90,000 to finance an information campaign to get the word out.

But the money is secondary to the idea that babies and people with immune deficiencies are at risk of dying from a disease that is essentially totally preventable if everyone got their vaccinations and boosters.

I cannot state that any more simply. The antivax crowd says vaccines cause autism, vaccines cause neurological problems, vaccines hurt your immune ...

Help find Hubble’s Hidden Treasures

Phil Plait — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:00:57 +0000

I worked with Hubble Space Telescope data for about ten years, and one of the most amazing things about that was seeing the images fresh off the mirror. Knowing that no human on Earth had ever seen that particular object that sharply was a thrill.

Not every Hubble observation gets turned into a gorgeous image, though. A lot of them don’t need to be for scientific publications, for one thing, and for another not every observation is of a targeted object for a specific purpose. Because of that, there are probably hundreds and hundreds of amazing objects — galaxies, nebulae, star clusters — buried in the data, waiting to be found.

That’s where you come in: the folks at the European Space Agency’s Hubble HQ are holding a contest they call Hidden Treasures. You can look through the Hubble observation archive for images and tweak them using online tools they provide, or you can really roll up your sleeves and use professional astronomical software to prettify the images. They’ve made a video explaining the Hubble archive, which may help.

The contest has nice prizes (an iPod Touch, ...

If the Mayans were right, it was probably about Internet comments

Phil Plait — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:55:11 +0000

A little while back, I was at Utah State University to give a public talk about the threat from asteroid impacts and what we can do to stop them (PLUG ALERT: if you want me to come talk at your venue, my agent would love to hear from you).

While I was there I was interviewed by Utah Public Radio, and that interview is online.

I was also chatted up by the local TV station, KSL. I think it went OK, and they put it online as well:

[You may have to refresh this page to get the video to load.]

While I rather wish I had stated succinctly that even the basis of the "Mayan 2012 doomsday" nonsense is itself a gross misinterpretation of Mayan history, culture, and calendar, I think I was pretty clear. I have to walk a fine line sometimes: debunking crap doomsday scenarios like 2012 while also warning of real dangers like asteroid impacts… while neither over- or understating that danger. It’s a delicate balance.

A balance, I’ll note, which is apparently completely lost on some of the commenters on the KSL website who ...