On March 17, just a month from now, NASA’s MESSENGER probe is scheduled to enter orbit around Mercury, the smallest planet in the solar system. No other mission from Earth has ever done this, and for the first time we’ll get high-resolution maps of the entire globe.

On its way down, the spacecraft was commanded to turn around and look outward, toward space. It took a series of images of what it saw… this astonishing family portrait of the solar system:

Click it to ensolarsystemate it and see it in more detail. When you do you’ll see the five classical planets in our system, as well as the Earth and Moon. Uranus and Neptune are there, but too faint to see, unfortunately, but still, this is an interesting picture. In November 2010, when these pictures were taken, Mercury was still nothing more than a dot. In fact, all the planets as barely more than dots, a reminder that this probe is well away from home and nowhere near any solid ground.

I like very much the images of Venus and the Earth. Venus is technically the closest planet to MESSENGER besides Mercury, though it depends on where the planets are in their orbits. It’s extremely bright as seen from the spacecraft, since MESSENGER is inside the orbit of Venus: the planet is therefore close to being full (like the full Moon) and reflects a lot of light back to the cameras.

And the Earth is accompanied by the Moon! That always amazed me. I’m so used to seeing pictures of just the Earth from space that it’s easy to forget that the Moon travels along with us. An important reminder in this picture is just how far the Moon is from us; 400,000 km is over 100 times the Moon’s size, so it appears to be a dot located well away from its home planet. If you wanted to make a scale model of it, a good way would be to use a golf ball to be Earth, and a marble located a meter away to be the Moon. That really brings home — ironically! — how small and distant our Moon is.

If you look to Jupiter you can see it has a couple of moons near it as well. The four moons spotted by Galileo 400 years ago are pretty big; Ganymede is actually about the same size as Mercury itself! Were Jupiter not there, Ganymede might be considered a planet on its own.

I smiled when I saw the section of the picture between Jupiter and Mars — that fuzzy glow is the Milky Way itself! The split down the middle is a dead giveaway; that’s caused by dust located in the disk of our galaxy. That section of the sky looks toward the center of our galaxy in the direction of the constellations Scorpius and Sagittarius.

I mention that last part on purpose. (more…)

Carl Sagan had many great and important things to say. His words inspired millions of people to look up, to be curious, to wonder.

Reid Gower was so inspired. He set Sagan’s words to imagery, and created this powerful, powerful video. Make sure to set the resolution to 720.

Tip of the plosive to reddit.

I imagine that a lot of folks who read my blog have already seen this, but just in case: go read Carl Sagan and his fully armed spaceship of the imagination. One panel is here, and the rest is really funny.

And if you don’t understand the last two panels, this might help.

I have long said that science fiction on television, even when it’s bad, can serve as inspiration for a budding scientist. Heck, I watched some pretty phenomenally bad scifi TV and movies and a kid, and it fueled the fire of interest and love I had for science. Do I wish the quality of science in the entertainment media were better? Sure! But that doesn’t mean it’s not serving a purpose.

Science in other media, like the news, is another matter. There, it’s critical that it be accurately represented. And it gets worse when someone makes a documentary that’s actually a polemic – a persuasive piece meant to change or guide opinions.

That’s why I really like this talk by scientist Brian Cox, who makes science documentaries for the BBC and is becoming a science celebrity in the UK. It was the Royal Television Society Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture which he gave earlier this month on BBC2. he has a lot to say about the difference between documentaries and polemicals, and it’s worth your time to watch.

You can also watch Part 2 and Part 3.
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John Boswell, a musician from Washington State, is famous on the web for creating the Symphony of Science — musically autotuned talks by scientists and skeptics discussing the nature of science, reality, and wonder. These are impossibly catchy videos, worth watching over and again. The first, featuring Carl Sagan, was called A Glorious Dawn, and was simply amazing. It quickly went viral, becoming huge on the web.

John has just released his seventh in the SoS series, called A Wave of Reason, and like all of them is profound and lovely. And you may recognize one or two of the people in it…

So yeah, that’s me at about 1:26, saying "Teach a man to reason and he’ll think for a lifetime." It’s from my "Don’t Be A Dick" speech that I gave at TAM 8, and I think it’s worth putting it into context. Here’s some more from that part of the speech (starting at about ten minutes in):
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November 9 is the 76th anniversary of Carl Sagan’s birth, and is celebrated across the globe as Carl Sagan Day (in general, places that celebrate the day do so on the Saturday previous; so, today!). He did more to bring the wonders of the Universe to the world than any other human being, alive or otherwise, and this day should be a holiday.

In honor of that, I present to you my friend Sara Mayhew’s idea of what she plans to do:

Sounds like a good idea to me. If you’re curious about the apple pie thing, try here. It’s Sagan’s best quote, hands down.

I attended a Carl Sagan Day last year in Broward County, Florida and wrote about the experience. Everything I need to say about Carl and his influence is there, so go read it. Also, that same group in Broward is holding an event this year which will be streamed live.

The world may be a poorer place without him, but it’s much, much better place for having had him once in it.

I’ll be at SETIcon, a celebration of 50 years of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, August 13 – 15. It’ll be a lot of fun, featuring some famous scientists and actors from Star Trek.

Part of the festivities will be a night of Rock Band hosted by me. If people pander enough, then I might take the stage as well. Can I sing or play drums? Come and find out.

They’ve also announced some new guests, including my friends Robert Sawyer (who wrote the novel Flash Forward) and astronomer Gibor Basri, who was a panelist on the recent Quest for a Living World event I moderated last month. Gibor is actively involved in the Kepler mission, which is looking for new Earths orbiting other stars.

Also — and this is very cool — there will be a copy of the novel Contact signed by Carl Sagan, Jodie Foster, and Jill Tarter auctioned at the event. Cripes, I may bid on that myself.

I plan on having a blast. I wind up working hard at these meetings a lot of the time, but for this one I think there will be some kicking back and actually enjoying it. You should come, too.