Because it’s a FAQ: I won’t be at the San Diego Comic Con this year, but I will be at Dragon*Con.

For the past few years, Discover Magazine has hosted an increasingly popular and extremely fun panel on Science and Science Fiction at Comic Con, which I’ve been honored to moderate. Unfortunately, this year we won’t be doing the panel, so I won’t be attending. I’m sad, but we’ll be there next year for sure. I hate to miss such a huge geekapalooza, but we’ll have to figure out some way to make the 2012 panel extra-awesome. I’m thinking the panelists will skydive in. Or we’ll fight with bat’leths. Something.

In better news, I’ll be at Dragon*Con on September 1-5. In fact, I’ll be at the becoming-an-annual-event star party on Thursday night, September 1, where we raise money for cancer research. D*C has a very strong skeptic track, and I’ll be there as well as doing other talks and fun things (like having a two-person panel with my friend Kevin Grazier, where we rip on science in movies and TV). There are also tons of other things going on there, like the parties, the costumes, the dealer rooms, the general madness.

Read the links below in the Related Posts to get the idea. I’ll post my schedule when I get it, and if you’re a reader here, find me at one of my events!

… and I still want to bring a costume. I have an idea, but we’ll see if I can figure out how to pull it off.

Regular readers may know me as the beloved online blogger for Discover Magazine, but I also sometimes write longer articles for the print version as well.

Last summer, I wrote a piece on the search for small solar system objects that might, theoretically, circle the Sun inside Mercury’s orbit. Called vulcanoids, they are extremely difficult to observe, which is why it’s still not certain if they exist or not (I wrote a brief post about this back in 2008). Two astronomers (and friends of mine), Dan Durda and Alan Stern, are hot on the trail of the purported possible planetesimals; I talked to them about their chase and the history of the search for these hot little objects.

Until now, the article was only available in the print magazine or to online subscribers, but now my brilliant prose is open to the public. Seriously, this is a pretty cool topic, and one that most people don’t know about. The region between the Sun and Mercury is closer to the Earth than the main asteroid belt, yet we know much less about it. Read the article and find out why.

[UPDATE: The article discussed below is now online at Discover Magazine's website, so you can read it there.]

Every now and again I delve back into the ancient art of writing for an actual magazine that has words printed in ink on paper which gets sent to you via the postal service.

Quaint, I know.

But I wrote just such an article for Discover Magazine which is in the December 2010 issue. The article, called "Why Size Matters" is about why defining the word planet is proving to be so difficult.

Funny how writing works sometimes. I got the idea for the article while researching a blog post on a moon in the outer solar system. Curious about its size, I started poking around the web looking for other moon diameters, and then started wondering how big an object you need before gravity crushes it into a ball. I thought I could write the article about just that, but the words apparently had a mind of their own and went in a different direction. I wound up talking about what we think of as planets, and then in the middle of all this I read an advance copy of Mike Brown’s wonderful book How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming (full review coming soon). Mike spends quite a bit of time on this very topic, as you might imagine (he discovered the Kuiper Belt object Eris, which kick-started the demotion of Pluto). I found his thinking to be very similar to mine, and his writing actually gelled a lot of disorganized thoughts I had about all this.

Anyway, the article was fun to write, and I think anyone who likes my blog will like it. I got the issue in the mail the other day, and it’s on newsstands and at bookstores now. I hope you’ll check it out.

I’m very pleased to announce that once again, Discover Magazine and the venerable telescope company Celestron have teamed up for the Capture the Universe astrophotography contest!

The rules are pretty simple. Just like last year, you have to register on the Celestron images website, read the rules, and then enter your picture(s). An important caveat: at least one piece of equipment you use must have Celestron optics.

Once again, my mind control beam has worked perfectly: Discover Magazine and Celestron picked me to judge the entries. I won’t tell you outright what might win and what might not, but like last year, I’m looking for beautiful images, interesting images, out-of-the-ordinary images. For example, the picture to the left won last year because it was such a cool idea – the photographer took a picture of every planet in the solar system (except Earth, and, for you diehards, Pluto) and the Sun all in the same 24 hour period, then put them together in this montage. You can also check out the other images from last year, too. They’re all really amazing shots.

The contest prizes are very nice: a Celestron Nexstar 8SE telescope (retail value: $1199) for the Grand Prize, an Axiom LX31 eyepiece ($399) for the Runner Up, and a 50th Anniversary First Scope ($70) for the Viewers’ Choice picture.

The contest starts TODAY, October 1, 2010 and ends on October 30, 2010. So get out there and start snapping.

Clear skies, everyone!

Last week was Comic Con, and for the third year in a row, the Hive Overmind Discover Magazine sent me along to be on a panel. Every year we do a variation on discussing the science of science fiction, and this year we focused on its abuse. We asked our panelists (Jaime Paglia [Eureka], Kevin Grazier [science advisor for Eureka and Battlestar Galactica], Zack Stentz [Fringe, Thor], and Sean Carroll [cosmologist and DM blogger]) to pick examples of good and bad science in the movies.

The results? Well, watch for yourself:

A couple of notes:
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In April 2010, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion of astronomers who are searching for planets orbiting other stars, with the hope of eventually finding earth-like planets. The panel, called "Quest for a Living World", was held in Pasadena (sponsored by Discover Magazine, the Thirty Meter Telescope project, and Caltech). We talked about the technology being used to look for planets, how the science is progressing, and even how we look for signs of life.

The video from the panel is now available:

Watching it again I was struck by how young these scientists are. They have not only their whole careers ahead of them, but also an entirely new field of science they’re exploring: exoplanetary science. Think of it! For thousands of years we wondered if there were other worlds out there like ours, or even unlike ours. Now we not only have answers to that question, but we’re actually learning about the physics of these worlds, their chemistry… and who knows? In a few years, we may even be investigating their biospheres.

Two of my Hive Overmind Discover Magazine co-bloggers took home the top two awards from Three Quark Daily’s science blogging contest: Carl Zimmer of The Loom, and our new blogger Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science. They both wrote about interbreeding of sorts, clearly pandering to the judge, squishy science advocate Richard Dawkins.

OK, seriously, this is very cool. It’s nice to see science blogging get recognized (some major web awards still don’t have a science category), very nice to see good science blogging get recognized, and very very nice that two of the three awards went to folks here at Discover.

When I first moved my blog to Discover a couple of years ago now, I wasn’t sure how it would go, but I trusted the brand and the people at the magazine. This was clearly a good decision — I’m happy here, and I’m really proud of Carl and Ed. They deserved those awards… and I bet we’ll be seeing a few more coming this way over time. We have an excellent group of writers here, and I suspect Discover Magazine will be a force among online science journalism and opinion writing for a long, long time to come.