Starfield from Dawn, 21 Mar 11. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

It’s a starfield! This is a great picture and was taken by the Dawn spacecraft’s framing camera.  The camera was powered up for a test after a six month hibernation along with some of the other instruments on board.

Back to trying to find this view on my planetarium software, easier said than done with no targeting data.  Actually if you’ve ever done the matching thing, it can be very challenging even when you know the area.

Oh, if you have a planetarium program or better yet your own pictures of starfields and want to try mapping them out OR you just want to see targeted parts of the sky or objects like M57 say, give The Aladin Sky Atlas a try (I use the JAVA applet on the right), you will find the manual useful.  Note: you may get a security certificate notice, always have, probably always will, I’ve never had a problem and I’ve been going there for years.   Also this is for deep sky objects so stick to galaxies, nebulae and the like.

Ok maybe it’s not a parade. Still it’s good stuff even if at least some of these people are about to collect unemployment. It appears the “hope and change” is working, just not like some thought it would. Ah well, you know the old saying: be careful what you wish for. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

This time-lapse video shows employees at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Fla., taking a few moments to assemble for a historic aerial photo outside the Vehicle Assembly Building. Thousands of workers stood side-by-side to form an outline of a space shuttle. The event was organized in honor of the Space Shuttle Program’s 30-year legacy.

Video

In 1867, two astronomers working with the 40 cm Foucault telescope at the Paris observatory discovered three new stars in the constellation Cygnus.  These stars were showing emission bands along the spectrum where they were “supposed to be” showing absorption bands.  The astronomers were Charles Wolf and Georges Rayet, and they had found an enigma which they named Wolf-Rayet stars.

NASA/JPL Cal-Tech the Baby Boom Galaxy, known as a Wolf-Rayet Galaxy due to its massive activity

Now, very quickly; Wolf-Rayet stars are not a type of star so much as the evolutionary stage of a type of star.  Did that make sense?  The type of star likely to evolve into a Wolf-Rayet must have a mass in excess of 20 solar, stellar winds in speeds up to 2,000 km/s, and be very hot — surface temperatures in the neighborhood of 25,000 K to 50,000  K.  Wolf-Rayet stars have the potential to supernova to a black hole, releasing gamma ray bursts from their poles in the process.

Wolf-Rayet 104 diagram, Dr. Peter Tuthill, University of Sydney, School of Physics

That takes care of the background, now enter Wolf-Rayet 104.  Discovered in 1998, WR104 is a dynamic binary system about 8,000 ly from Earth.  As the Wolf-Rayet star spins around its class OB companion it releases matter into the interstellar medium, giving it one of its nicknames:  A smoking chimney.

NASA/Kepler Dr. Peter Tuthill, University of Sydney

WR104 is extremely luminous.  A side-by-side comparison of WR104 to Sol is about the same as a side-by-side comparison of Sol and Luna.

When you look at the Keck images of WR104, you are looking down on one of its poles watching matter get flung away into that spiral shape, like looking down on a water sprinkler.  That’s really cool, except for one small detail:  Wolf-Rayet stars tend to produce gamma ray bursts when they collapse down into black holes, and gamma ray bursts (GRB) are emitted from the poles.

Hmmmmm.

James Bond as portrayed by Pierce Brosnan

As you can imagine, a lot of astronomers are looking at WR104.  More intensive studies seem to indicate that we aren’t going to be “spot on”, but off as much as 16 degrees.  That helps, but those same studies are showing WR104 may be as close as 5,000 ly.

Hmmmmm.

Whatever happens, WR104 and its massive companion are going to supernova, and soon (astronomically speaking).  Were it to form a gamma ray burst when it happens, and were the Earth right in its sights, that’s the end of the story.  We’ve talked about GRBs before.

Now, if we’re NOT right on the bull’s eye but far enough away to stay safe, that would be some kind of cosmic event… and we would have front row seats.  Whichever, WR104 has all the mystery, suspense, and action of an “A-List” thriller.

Got that popcorn ready?

Did you get a chance to look at the rising “super moon”?  From what I’ve seen, it’s definitely living up to its expectation.  Take a look at this NASA image, shot as the moon was rising beside the Lincoln Memorial:

NASA full perigee moon over Washington DC - the Lincoln Memorial

Now, if  THAT didn’t make your jaw drop, these next two surely will:

Full perigee moon - Harry Mason, all rights reserved (image used with permission) - great enlargement, too

Full moon superimposed over perigee full moon - Harry Mason, all rights reserved, (image used with permission) - check out the enlargement

These images are courtesy of their author, Harry Mason.  That gorgeous full moon shot was taken 03/19/11 at 12:51am, and the earlier full moon used to show the difference in sizes was taken 01/18/11 at about 6pm.  Both shots were taken with Harry’s hand-held Cannon SX200IS.  I spent a lot of time on Harry’s website, looking at the world through his eyes.  I’d recommend the trip.

Thanks for letting me use the images, Harry.  I’m seriously impressed, and looking forward to your future work.

YAY!

Coming tonight at 7:41 EDT.  Goodbye winter!!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hope everybody got to see the moon last night or this morning!  We had clear skies on both ends, I’ve still got to get batteries to pull the pictures off the camera as I ran the thing flat last night.  Too bad too I think the pictures would have been better this morning.

Using the scope and it’s camera is still out of the question because rolling the roof off the observatory is still beyond my limits.  Not that it would have mattered too much, it would have been pretty meaningless to image the moon with them, there’s no scale and due to trees the east horizon is out and I can’t see to the west.

Lot’s of people got pictures though.  I am happy so many took the opportunity to check it out!!

Did you watch the video?  Curiosity is a good sized rover!

You can watch the construction of the actual Mars-bound rover that will be launched this autumn.

Video

1) First, a post from the past: 10 questions for Jim Crow. Arguably the doyen of modern population geneticists. Take a look at who he’s had as graduate students or post-docs, and there’s a high probability there is someone you know of, you’ve met, or you know of by reputation (at least if you have some association with pop gen).

2) Weird search query of the week: “hot arab ass.”

3) Comment of the week, in response to “Puzzling the odds of disease risk”:

What would be interesting (and very simple) to see is this:

Take DNA of all the dead people with good medical history and see if aggregate of all the various risks predicts time and/or cause of death with any reliability. $200K buys N=2,000 which is not unreasonable for entities that have access to lots of dead peoples’ DNA.

4) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:

Recently I blogged about how the mere existence of whales might be an important clue to treating cancer. That post has drawn many readers, and many questions in the comment thread.

Happily, the authors of the review I described–Carlo Maley of the University of California, San Francisco, and Aleah Caulin of the University of Pennsylvania–have joined the thread. They’ve answered the first set of reader questions and promise to come back to respond to the rest. Further proof of the majesty of blogs…

“Sexual selection via mate choice may have influenced the evolution of women’s breast morphology. We conducted an image-based questionnaire quantifying and comparing the preferences of men from Papua New Guinea (PNG), Samoa, and New Zealand (NZ) for images of women’s breast size, breast symmetry, areola size, and areolar pigmentation. Results showed that men from PNG preferred larger breasts to a greater extent than men from Samoa and NZ, providing some support for the hypothesis that men from subsistence living cultures have a greater preference for morphological cues indicative of caloric reserves. Symmetrical breasts were most attractive to men in each culture. However, preferences were highest among NZ men, followed by men from Samoa, and were lowest among men from PNG. These results did not support the hypothesis that people living in higher pathogen environments have a greater preference for traits indicative of pathogen resistance and developmental stability. Large areolae were preferred among men from PNG, and to a lesser extent in Samoa, while in NZ men preferred medium-sized areolae. Thus, men’s preferences for women’s areolar size appear to be highly culturally specific. Darkly pigmented areolae were most attractive to men ...

What’s the News: Archeologists have discovered thousands of stone tools in Texas that are over 15,000 years old. The find is important because it is over 2,000 years older than the so-called Clovis culture, which had previously thought to be the first human culture in North America. As Texas A&M University anthropologist Michael Waters says, “This is almost like a baseball bat to the side of the head of the archaeological community to wake up and say, ‘hey, there are pre-Clovis people here, that we have to stop quibbling and we need to develop a new model for peopling of the Americas’.”

How the Heck:

At a site on Buttermilk Creek in central Texas, Archeologists discovered 15,528 items, ranging from chert flakes to blades and chisels.
The first indication that the tools were older than anything previous seen on North America came from their stratigraphic horizon: The excavated layer was underneath a layer of classic Clovis tools. (The sediments showed no indication of mixing after the tools were dropped.)
The most conclusive evidence came from a dating technique called optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ...

This is painful to watch, but in terms of media scientific illiteracy, also highly instructive (h/t CJR):

Over on the Facebooks, Matt Strassler points to a BBC story about the role of quantum mechanics in explaining our sense of smell. There aren’t any equations in the article, and I haven’t read the research papers, but the idea seems to be that electrons move from one part of a protein to another part via quantum tunneling. The potential that allows this to happen is only set up if you have the right chemical involved, which is how the protein purportedly “smells” the existence of this chemical. The resulting mechanism is just absurdly sensitive — apparently fruit flies can smell the difference between hydrogen and deuterium (chemically identical, but tiny differences in atomic energy levels from having an extra neutron in the nucleus).

It’s still a controversial theory, but apparently not crackpotty. The question of how important quantum mechanics (as opposed to just its classical limit) is for biological processes was brought up in our earlier post on quantum photosynthesis. Which reminds me in turn of this worthwhile talk by Seth Lloyd, on the basic topic of “quantum life” and photosynthesis in particular. In between learning about how quantum phenomena might remain relevant in the hot, warm environment of a plant, you can enjoy Lloyd’s principled stance not to use PowerPoint under any circumstances.

At The Intersection Sheril Kirshenbaum posts some rather stark data from Gallup and a Canadian outfit on the differences in attitudes toward evolution between Americans and Canadians. Those Tories are different! The answers seem very similar to those on offer for the General Social Survey’s “CREATION” question. I thought I’d compare Canadians to various American demographics. The question was asked in 2004 of over 1,400 Americans. I find it somewhat ironic in that I think there has been some question as to the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, and his attitude toward evolution. Harper is a member of the Evangelical Protestant Christian and Missionary Alliance (and apparently has appointed known Creationists to various government positions, something controversial or notable in Canada). In contrast, Barack Hussein Obama is famously more grounded in evolution than angels.

Humans… Were created by God in the last 10,000 years
Evolved through natural selection
Evolved over time through divine guidance
DK/NR Canada, 2011
14
58
19
8 USA, 2010
40
16
38
6 God created man
Man has evolved
Man has evolved, but god guided
Other USA, 2004
43
12
42
4 Demographics Male
38
14
44
4 Female
47
11
40
3 Age 18-34
38
11
48
3 Age 35-64
43
13
40
4 Age 64-
49
13
37
2 No diploma
47
13
36
4 HS diploma
49
10
38
3 College degree
32
15
50
4 Graduate degree
21
26
49
4 Protestant
55
6
37
3 Catholic
37
8
52
3 No Religion
20
32
43
6 Democrat
37
17
44
2 Independent
44
11
41
5 Republican
48
7
40
5 White
41
14
42
3 Black
57
6
34
4 New England
25
15
51
10 Mid-Atlantic
32
15
50
3 E. North Central
42
10
46
2 W. North Central
37
15
46
2 South Atlantic
55
12
28
5 E. South Central
52
6
41
2 W. South Central
53
6
38
3 Mountain
43
13
42
2 Pacific
30
18
46
6

Image Credit: Yosemite

What the heck hit Mars and made this?

[Click to barsoomenate.]

This image is from my favorite Red Planet paparazzo, the HiRISE camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It shows three craters, each about 1.5 to 2 km (0.9 to 1.2 miles) across… and they all formed at the same time!

How can I tell? Well, for one thing, if this were a coincidence, with three impacts happening at very different times, then you’d see overlap in the crater rims; the earliest crater would be partially obscured by the later crater, and that in turn by the most recent impact. But that’s not the case here, since the rims aren’t overlaying each other. In fact, the straight walls between them are exactly what you’d expect if you have impact explosions happening simultaneously: the expanding shock waves smack into each other and create a linear feature.

Not only that, but let your eye follow the straight lines between craters up and down, above and below the craters themselves and onto the landscape. You can see that the hellish expanding wall of fire etched itself onto the Martian ...

What’s the News: For the first time in medical history, scientists have successfully grown mouse sperm in a laboratory. As Northwestern University cell biologist Erwin Goldberg told New Scientist, “People have been trying to do this for years.” It’s hoped that being able to grow sperm outside the testes will lead to improved fertility treatments for men.

How the Heck:

The concept is simple: Combine the right dosage of chemicals that will provide nourishment to testes in a petri dish. Actually finding the magic amount is a tedious process of trial and error.
First, the team genetically engineered mice “so that a protein only present in fully grown sperm would fluoresce green.”
Next, the scientists extracted germ cells (which produce sperm) from the newborn mice testes, and put them in a bath of agarose gel, fetal bovine serum, testosterone, and other chemicals.
After about a month, they discovered that virtually half of the lab-grown sperm were glowing, indicating that they were fully grown.
They then used in vitro fertilization to impregnate female mice, who eventually gave birth to fertile mice themselves.

Context:

Past attempts at lab-grown sperm weren’t very successful. Many of ...