Blogs / Bad Astronomy

The Solar Dynamics Observatory, due for launch on February 9 at 10:30 Eastern time (15:30 GMT), is a revolution in solar observing: equipped with state-of-the art detectors, it’ll stare at the Sun and teach us far more about our closest star than we’ve ever had a chance to before. It’s like SOHO on steroids.

I was going to write up a lengthy post about it, but then I found out my friend Nicole Gravitationaliotta, aka The Noisy Astronomer, already put together a great post about it. That saves me time.

Something I want to point out: SDO will have a continuous science data streamrate of a whopping 16 megabytes per second. You might want to read that again. That’s 1.4 terabytes per day, or half a petabyte per year. Given that a Blu-Ray disk holds 50 gigabytes at most, that means SDO would fill 28 disks a day just to store that data. Cripes. That’s a vast amount of data to sift through. If the Sun is hiding anything, it has about a week to figure out what to do. After that we’ll be watching everything it does.

Also, a fun thing about this for me is that the project scientist for SDO is Barbara Thompson, a woman I’ve known a long, long time: her office was across from mine when I was working on Hubble, and I would often drop by to swap stories with her and generally mix it up. It’s very cool to know that an old friend will be helping run such a fantastic astronomical instrument.

[Update; The launch was scrubbed due to low clouds. The next launch attempt will be at 04:14 Eastern (09:14 GMT) Monday morning... but they're predicting 60% chance of low clouds again!]

Don’t forget: the Space Shuttle Endeavor is scheduled to launch tomorrow, Sunday February 7, at 04:39 Eastern time (09:39 GMT). It’s the last planned night launch of a shuttle. I will not be live-tweeting it, since that’s 02:30 my time and I’m not staying up for it (I have to travel Monday and don’t need to screw up my system that much). But a lot of folks are there and will be tweeting it as it happens, like Universe Today’s Nancy Atkinson. Follow her for more info as it happens.

Image credit: NASA.

I knew writing comic book dialog was easy! This is a brilliant idea. Geez, I need to start thinking of stuff like this myself. Step 3: profit!

And yes, I wrote those lines myself. Use ‘em if you want, but if you don’t credit me the batarang’ll be paying you a visit.

I don’t usually do this, but TechyDad left such a great comment on my post about the antics of antivax founder Andrew Wakefield, I have to reproduce it here for all to see.

Talking about the inherent contradictions and cherry-picking that go on in the alt-med purveyors’ heads, TechyDad says:

Gotta love the disconnect. If pharmaceutical companies make any money off of vaccines, it’s "Big Pharma’s injecting us with chemicals to make money!!!"

Now if a homeopath or an "alternative therapy" company makes money off of their "treatment" it’s “They’re such wonderful people helping to treat these awful conditions!”

If a single batch of a single vaccine is recalled for a tiny problem they shout "See!!??? Big Pharma’s trying to pump us full of unsafe toxins!!!!"

If a company comes out with an outrageous sounding "alternative therapy" for some disease, they say "They say it works right here. It’s alternative and alternative is always good."

If a homeopath says Treatment X doesn’t work they say "It must not work because he’s a homeopath and thus is fighting against the Medical Establishment."

If a physician says Treatment Y doesn’t work they say "It must work and the Medical Establishment is suppressing it."

In other words, they’re right, science is wrong and all evidence will be cherry picked and skewed until their view is supported.

Nailed it in one.

Reproduced here with permission from TechyDad.

I don’t watch the show Dragon’s Den, though I’ve heard of it: potential entrepreneurs pitch their products to a group of wealthy investors in the hope that they will get some capital. The investors — the dragons — are blunt when they need to be, and it does make for an interesting show.

… especially when the guy who comes in pitching his wares is an alt-med quack who says his bottle of water will cure everything from pink eye to leukemia to cancer:

Too bad ultradistilled water doesn’t cure vulturism. That guy looks pretty unhappy as he left, but he was treated very nicely indeed compared to what he deserves.

Captain Disillusion is the reigning superhero of skepticism, and his video exploits are legendary.

Of course, he’s also a filthy liar, saying I don’t like cats:

[Shh! I have to say I like cats, because if I don't then my cat will steal my breath in the middle of the night and kill me.]

Click through to see the rest. He’s funny. And Bolingbrook Babbler somehow caught wind of this as well, to my chagrin. Of course, it’s one of the few MSM outlets that gets quotes from me right…

I love clouds, and Boulder is a never-ending and always-changing nebular cloudscape of them.

Last Saturday I saw this out my home office window:

It was gorgeous! It’s a lenticular (lens-shaped) orographic cloud; a cloud caused by moisture-laden air rising up and cooling as it passes over mountains. We see them here all the time just east of the Rockies, and when they get all lenticular it’s a very cool bonus.

Orographic clouds aren’t limited to the Earth you know; other planets have atmospheres with some moisture and tall mountains to overcome as well.

Some people think that science takes away the romance of nature. Those people are wrong. When I lie out in the Sun and muse about the pretty clouds over my home town, I can know that what I’m seeing happens on other planets spinning around the Sun, and I’ll just bet it’s happening somewhere on a planet orbiting some other distant sun, lost among the billions in our galaxy.

What could possibly be more romantic than that?