Blogs / Bad Astronomy

The wonderful ladies at Skepchick have posted their holiday gift-giving guide. It’s a podcast, and has lots of good suggestions for you. Of course, books make fine gifts as well.

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.

I love it when astronomers release beautiful images simply because they are beautiful.

That’s Omega Centauri, a globular cluster. It contains millions of stars, all gravitationally bound to one another. It orbits the Milky Way and is currently about 18,000 light years away. At 150 light years across, it’s a densely packed beehive of stars.

It’s also easily visible to the unaided eye. Centaurus is a southern constellation, so it’s high overhead if you live south of the Equator. But many years ago, while I was doing my Master’s research at the University of Virginia, I saw it with my own eyes. I was out on the telescope catwalk that circled the dome, and was just looking at the stars. Right on the horizon, nestled between two Smoky Mountain peaks, was a fuzzy dot. I watched it for a few minutes, puzzling over what it could be. A cloud? No, it wasn’t moving. Smoke from a chimney? Maybe, but in the summer?

Then it hit me. Omega Cen? No, couldn’t be! But I went inside and checked the cluster’s coordinates. Knowing my latitude, I did the numbers in my head and realized that Omega Cen could just barely be seen, given the conditions: I was up high, looking between two mountains, and atmospheric refraction (the bending of light from stars upward due to the Earth’s air) near the horizon would lend a hand as well. I checked through binoculars, but the thick air only made the fuzzy dot a little bigger.

Still, that was an amazing moment for me; I had no idea you could see Omega Cen that far north. Of course, when you observe it from Chile with a 2.2 meter ’scope, you get a slightly better view, as shown above.

And let me repeat: the European Southern Observatory didn’t release this image to go with any big scientific result. It was just simply a gorgeous image, and they wanted to share. Awesome.

Image courtesy ESO.

If you happen to live in the UK (or someplace that gets BBC 2), then you should watch Brian Cox on the show "Horizon" tonight at 9:00 p.m. He’s a gifted speaker, and the topic is the nature of time. I live here in the Colonies, so I’ll miss it, but I’m hoping to catch it on the web somehow (I also have a couple of moles in England who send me stuff sometimes, too).

In the meantime, here’s the trailer for the show.

If the music sounds familiar to some of you, it’s from Doctor Who. That already makes me want to see the program. And, of course, some of you might want to see it because Brian has a certain, um, appeal to a lot of folks. I just like the topic, and Brian himself, so I’m looking forward to watching this when I can.

Tip o’ the bowler hat to Gia.

On December 1, Venus, Jupiter, and the Moon made this pretty formation in the sky:

That shot was taken on my little department store digital camera. All I did was mount it on a good tripod and bracket the exposure (that is, take a bunch of shots with different exposure times). I knew my neighbor’s tree would make an interesting sight in a longish (10 second) exposure, and tried to balance the foreground objects. The glowing clouds were a nice bonus.

My point is, taking pretty shots of astronomical events is not terribly hard, and if you have even basic equipment you should take the opportunity to try.

Search Flickr for "Venus Moon Jupiter" to see tons of results from folks who took photos of this remarkable event. Dave Mosher on Discovery’s blog has more, as does Scott Hurst, and pretty much every other astronomy blog out there. It’s nice to see so many folks giving this a shot. If you have a picture online, link to it in the comments and let others see how yours look!

The Big Picture (the Boston Globe’s high-res photo feature) has a new idea: an advent calendar using Hubble pictures! Every day, TBP will post a new Hubble image with a brief explanation, leading up to Christmas.

TBP’s proprietor, Alan Taylor, had asked if I wanted to pitch in, but sadly I am overwhelmed with work right now (including researching this year’s Top Ten Astronomy Pictures; stay tuned for more info on that!) so he’s on his own… but judging by his first choice (V838 Monocerotis) I think he’ll do just fine.

Alexander Thatte is a young boy in the UK, the son of two physicists at Oxford University. He has leukemia, and he needs a new, expensive treatment. To raise funds, friends at the Oxford physics department have put together SkyPhoto: you can buy a framed print from the venerable Palomar Sky Survey, and funds go toward Alexander’s treatment.

The prints appear to look pretty nice, and they are semi-random: you can request a star field, a galaxy, or a nebula. There are added options too, like having them signed by Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell, who co-discovered pulsars in the 1960s. They are currently accepting checks (in UK pounds Sterling) only; you can download and print out the order form. They will ship overseas, however. There may be eBay auctions soon, so you can get them that way as well (and use PayPal if you’re set up for it). I’ll update this post when I find out more.

‘Tis the season, and this makes a pretty nice gift. Plus, you know you’re doing something good for someone, too.