EAST Lincs Astronomy Club’s next meeting is to be held on Saturday, May 19, at Gibraltar Point Nature Reserve from 8pm.
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Category Archives: Astronomy
The darkness and the light | Bad Astronomy
The sky is not as it seems.
Certainly, gazing upon it on a clear night you see so much: stars, planets, the glow of hot gas here and there but theres also darkness. Look at the Milky Way, its stream split down the middle by a rift of black. Gape at a gaudy nebula, and youll see it pocked here and there by pools of black.
But what is inky pitch to our eyes glows with a cold light to those attuned to it.
Tell me, what do you see here?
The bright star is obvious enough, but you can also, dimly, see a feathered stripe of black splashed across the vista, blocking, absorbing the light from stars behind it. Details are muted, structure difficult to ascertain, and you strain to see features that your brain cannot interpret.
But thats with your eyes. Try again, look at it, but this time, widen your view. See it now?
Well done! Where before you saw material absorbing light, now it emits! Of course, unbeknownst to you, you had some help: the ESO APEX telescope in Chile. It sees into the far, far infrared, where light is so stretched out it is entirely invisible to humans. In fact, the wavelength of light is so wide there that if it were a vibrating string, you could physically see the crests and troughs, since each would be separated by the next by nearly a millimeter. The light your eye can see has a wavelength only a thousandth that wide.
When APEX looked at this ribbon of dark, frigidly cold dust, it sees the material glowing. What we see as dark, it sees as bright. You can even compare the two directly, using a slider over the two versions of this picture, unveiling precisely what your now-expanded vision can take in.
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Solar Cinco de Mayo | Bad Astronomy
Alan Friedman is a photographer who takes amazing pictures of the Sun. While others were out celebrating Cinco de Mayo this past weekend, he was outside taking another jaw-dropping image of the nearest star in the Universe:
Yegads! Click to ensolarnate, and he has a greyscale version, too.
I love the detail and texture of his images. He has an excellent telescopic setup which yields the superb resolution, and he employs an old trick to get the texture: he inverts the image of the Suns disk, making black stuff look white and vice-versa. This is a technique thats been used by astronomers for decades to enhance images; our eyes see details better that way. When Alan does it, I swear it makes the Sun look like a 1.4 million-kilometer-wide shag rug.
All the way on the left, just on the Suns edge, you can see a group of sunspots just rotating into view. Thats Active Region 1476, and Alan provided me with a clear picture of them (no tom-foolery) which Ive put here. That monster group is about 100,000 kilometers (60,000 miles) across, so when I saw them I immediately suspected trouble.
and sure enough, they had a medium-sized eruption just this morning. At 13:00 UTC they blasted off an M1.4 class flare; big enough to potentially cause some radio disruption and maybe some aurorae. NASAs Solar Dynamics Observatory got a dramatic view of the eruption:
Flares this size are relatively common; there was one in late March for example. Bigger ones happen less frequently, though again we did see one 50 times this powerful in March as well! Well have to see if todays eruption will cause any aurorae, and either way, we should keep our eyes on AR1476.
Image credit: Alan Friedman, used by permission. Tip o the Sun visor to Camilla Corona SDO on Google+ for the video.
Related Posts:
- NASAs guide to solar flares - The Sun unleashes an X5.4 class flare - The Suns Angry Red Spot - The boiling, erupting Sun (to this day my favorite photo by Alan!)
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Unstoppable | Bad Astronomy
My willingness to fight has seen some major impediments in the past few weeks. The increase in antireality nonsense seems like a growing tsunami. Antivax health threats. Global warming denial on a major (and heavily funded) scale. The ugliness yesterday in North Carolina.
And even though weve had some great victories, its still an endless road, always uphill, always against the wind. Despair seems inevitable.
But then, but then, this:
Made for the Canadian Paralympic Committee, that may be the single greatest ad ever made. I suddenly find myself able to stand, dust myself off, and get back on the road.
Unstoppable. As we must be.
Tip o the starting gun to Laughing Squid.
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The Point on asteroid mining and antiscience | Bad Astronomy
The Point is a web-based talk show on the Young Turks YouTube channel where various issues are discussed by panelists. They have people send in short videos making some salient point, then panelists discuss it. Cara Santa Maria the senior science correspondent at The Huffington Post guest-hosted the show this last week, and asked me to send in a video for discussion. I talked about asteroid mining, which started an interesting discussion.
For more information about asteroid mining and Planetary Resources, you can read my recent post about them.
The video embedded above is set to start at my segment, but Ill note that my friend Chris Mooney was the first video they discussed, talking his new book "The Republican Brain". Chris is always careful when he discusses this topic, knowing it will be misinterpreted willfully or otherwise, which of course it has been. But I do have to point out one thing that bugged me: noted science author K. C. Cole was on the panel, and I agreed with much of what she said. But when talking about Chriss book, she brought out the "Well, theres antiscience on the left as well" meme, and that argument really irks me.
Yes, there does exist antiscience bias on the left as promulgated by antivaxxers and alt-medders and I have to debunk that way too often as well but its not nearly as far-reaching as antiscience on the right. Its not a party platform, for one thing, and for another there simply isnt nearly as much or as focused as it is on the right. Read this link for more about this (especially before you leave a comment here hint, hint).
Still, it was an interesting discussion on The Point, and Id like to thank Cara for inviting me. And as to her question at 35:43 yes. Yes, I am.
Related Posts:
- Breaking: Private company does indeed plan to mine asteroids and I think they can do it - Space firm about to make a big announcement. I take a stab at what it is. - TED talks now on Netflix including mine
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The Point on asteroid mining and antiscience | Bad Astronomy
Jupiter, acting all superior | Bad Astronomy
This is a cool picture:
What youre seeing is from the NASA/ESA satellite Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO. It stares at the Sun all the time, monitoring its activity. This image, from May 3, 2012 is from the LASCO C3, one of the cameras on board. It has a little metal paddle (called an occulter) to block the ferocious light of the Sun; thats the black bar and circle. The white outline is the position of the Sun and its size in the image.
You can see an emerging coronal mass ejection on the left: thats the bulb-shaped thingy. Its actually an incredibly violent expulsion of a billion tons of subatomic particles hurled away at high speed due to the explosive discharge of the Suns magnetic field but thats not why I posted this picture.
You can also see streamers coming from the Sun; those are places where particles flow freely into space from the Sun. Basically, the magnetic field of the Sun trails into space in those locations, allowing the wind to escape. But thats not why Im showing you this picture, either.
Look on the left. See that weird dot with the horizontal line through it? Thats Jupiter! The line is not real; its where the camera got overexposed by the planet (digital detectors like your phone camera convert photons of light into electrons, and if a source is too bright, the electrons overflow the pixels like water from a bucket. The way the camera works, the electrons flow along the horizontal grid of pixels, creating these lines. This is called "blooming").
Jupiter has been gracing our sky for months, but has been getting further west every night, closing the apparent distance between it and the Sun. Its on the opposite side of the Sun from us, at a distance of almost 900 million kilometers (550 million miles). When two objects get close in the sky, its called a conjunction. When its a planet on the far side of the Sun, its called superior conjunction. Just sos you know.
Anyway, I just think this is neat. Jupiter is roughly one-billionth as bright as the Sun, yet there it is in the picture! And even though SOHO is designed to look at the Sun, Jupiter is so bright its overexposed. Imagine if the spacecraft moved a bit and the Sun were to peek out from behind the occulter which can happen. SOHO goes into "safe mode" when that happens, shutting down systems that might get damaged. Every astronomical satellite has contingency plans like that, since its hard to send a repair service to most of em. Generally its fixable by sending software commands to the spacecraft once the underlying problem has been ascertained.
If you want, SOHO has images online that are updated constantly. Go see what the Sun is doing now! Over the next few days Jupiter will get closer to the Sun, then pass very close to or even behind the disk. LASCO 2, another camera on SOHO that has a smaller field of view but a bit more resolution, should show the moons too when Jupiter moves into its field. Ill post again when that happens. Thatll be even neater.
Image credit: NASA/ESA/SOHO
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Leading Astronomy Podcast Teams With Top Telescope On Demand Service
AstroPodcast and iTelescope announce sponsorship deal.Coonabarabran, Australia (PRWEB) May 07, 2012 Leading astronomy podcast AstroPodcast today announced a sponsorship deal with internet based telescope-on-demand service iTelescope that will see episodes featuring iTelescope announcements and special deals.iTelescope.Net is the world’s premier network of Internet connected telescopes, allowing ...
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Leading Astronomy Podcast Teams With Top Telescope On Demand Service
TheSkyNet set to conquer more of our universe
Public release date: 2-May-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Kirsten Gottschalk kirsten.gottschalk@icrar.org 61-438-361-876 International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research
In its ever-expanding quest to process astronomy data and discover much more of our Universe, theSkyNet has joined forces with the Pan-STARRS1 Science Consortium (PS1SC) to probe other galaxies beyond our own Milky Way.
The International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) home of theSkyNet has signed an agreement with the PS1SC to use donated computing resources to process the new telescope's images over 500 times faster than possible with an ordinary computer.
"This agreement gives theSkyNet's citizen scientists the opportunity to process data from another flavour of telescope that collects visible light, rather than radio waves," said ICRAR Director Professor Peter Quinn.
Pan-STARRS1 is an innovative telescope designed to examine a very large portion of the sky at once and collect light from as many distant galaxies as possible.
"Members of theSkyNet will be able to process the new data to help astronomers learn more about what's in a galaxy: from where the stars are; to how much dust there is; and how much light that dust blocks," said Professor Quinn.
Since its launch seven months ago, theSkyNet has been crunching data for radio astronomers, with more than 700 million processing jobs completed by the 6,000 active members. The new agreement extends that capability beyond radio astronomy into visible light.
"Processing the data from Pan-STARRS1 would take an average computer over 1,000 years, but we think the donated computing power of theSkyNet can do it in less than two years," said Professor Quinn.
The new agreement cements ICRAR's position as a 'survey science' leader, building on the centre's involvement in other top international astronomy surveys including the GAMA project, the LSST project and upcoming projects with the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP).
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Free astronomy program open to all ages Saturday near Suisun City
An astronomy program will be held Saturday night at Rush Ranch.
Local astronomy enthusiast Jim Jerrell will host the free program beginning at 7 p.m. with a short presentation, followed by a telescope viewing at about 8:30 p.m.
Telescopes will be on hand, but personal scopes are welcome. Attendees should bring warm clothing, and flashlight should be covered with red cellophane. The event is open to all ages.
Rush Ranch is near Suisun City at 3521 Grizzly Isle Road. For more information, call 422-4491 or visit http://www.rushranch.net.
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Free astronomy program open to all ages Saturday near Suisun City
Why is there something rather than nothing? | Bad Astronomy
Just a quick note: if youre looking to expand your mind enough to make your head explode, then read this very interesting essay by my fellow Hive Overmind Discover Magazine blogger and theoretical cosmologist Sean Carroll on why theres something rather than nothing. That is, why does the Universe exist the way it does?
Im simplifying it a bit here. But its similar to the question, why is there something rather than nothing, which Sean has also written about.
Theres some tech speak in the first article, but its a fascinating discussion of the nontroversy brewing between some scientists and some philosophers. I agree with Sean; many of the potshots they take are poorly aimed (though I do tend to agree with my friend Massimo Pigliucci when it comes to scientists misunderstanding the need and use for philosophy).
As Sean says, it does no good when participants in the two fields talk past each other. But I do disagree with him very mildly when he says,
the point of philosophy is not to be "useful" to science, any more than the point of mycology is to be "useful" to fungi.
Perhaps thats not the point of philosophy, but its a role philosophy plays, a critical one. After all, the way we practice science ideally relies on its philosophy. Maybe Im splitting hairs here, but Id call Karl Popper a scientific philosopher, as well as Galileo and many others who allow a meta-knowledge of how to do science influence they way they actually do it.
I suspect Ill have a fun conversation with Sean about this next time we get together!
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Supermoon Supercomic | Bad Astronomy
Apropos of my last post… This Sci-ence webcomic went up around the same time I posted my Supermoon deflation a few hours ago. COINCIDENCE? Well, yeah. Still, funny. And man. Those two women must really be tired of me. First the Moon Illusion in the park , and now this. Related Posts: - The Supermoon stuff? AGAIN? - In which I disagree with cartoon Neil Tyson - Naked I astronomy - A new SMBC book ...
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Straightening up the cosmos | Bad Astronomy
Oh, whats an astronomer to do?
Faced with a messy sky, stars scattered here and there, faint and bright, how can we ever measure them?
Perhaps we should turn to artists. Urs Wehrli has an idea of how to fix this situation. Faced with this picture:
He turned it into this one:
Ha! Awesome. It does make it easier to find the galaxies, doesnt it?
Herr Wehrli has a knack for this; if you like that sky cleaning routine, you should see what he does with alphabet soup, a conifer twig, and a grassy field with sunbathers. He has these pictures, and more, in his books, including The Art of Tidying Up. I gotta say, I dig this guys sense of humor.
Pictures credit: Urs Wehrli. Tip o the dust pail to Lawrence Cuthbert, via Jeannie Jeannie.
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Astronomy Gets Adorable: Ten-Year-Old Girl Discovers Supernova | Discoblog
Most ten-year-olds dont have the patience to sift through star images for thousands of hours. But Kathryn Aurora Gray was on a mission: She wanted to become the youngest person to discover a supernova.
And luckily for her, Kathryns work didnt take thousands of hoursshe discovered an exploded star about fifteen minutes after starting her career as an amateur astronomer. After looking through four of the 52 pictures provided by family friend and astronomer David Lane, she saw it, her father explains to the Canadian Star:
Kathryn pointed to the screen and said: Is this one? I said yup, that looks pretty good, said Paul Gray, describing his daughters find.
The images that Kathryn studied to find the supernova were taken by Lane on New Years Eve at his backyard astronomical observatory in Nova Scotia, Canada. On January 2nd, Kathryn and her father sat down to analyze Lanes images using a computer program that overlays pictures of the sky from different dates. If one of the stars in the frame brightens dramatically, it appears to blink when switching back and forth between the pictures. (See an animation here.)
After ruling out previously discovered supernovas and other comets or asteroids in the area, the Grays and Lane reported the find to the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. The discovery was soon verified by amateur astronomers in Illinois and Arizona, and was finally confirmed by the International Astronomical Union. The adults are all thrilled by Kathryns discovery, the Canadian Star reports:
Its fantastic that someone so young would be passionate about astronomy. What an incredible discovery. Were all very excited, said Deborah Thompson of RASC.
Kathryn couldnt have had a better set of teachers: This was her fathers seventh supernova discovery and Lanes third. Her father found his first supernova at age 22at the time he was the youngest person to discover one. According to the Royal Astronomical Society (pdf), the supernova is called 2010lt and is a magnitude-17 supernova in galaxy UGC 3378, in the constellation of Camelopardalis, 240 million light years away.
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Image: Paul Gray
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Astronomy Gets Adorable: Ten-Year-Old Girl Discovers Supernova | Discoblog
Pursuit of Light | Bad Astronomy
I don’t think I need to tell you much about this. Set it to the highest resolution, make it full screen, sit back, and watch this NASA promotional video called "Pursuit of Light" . [A huge 3420 x 1152 pixel version is available for download as well .] Most of the images shown have graced this blog over the past few months, and you can find various descriptions of them with details if you search ...
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Orlando Science Center: Month of astronomy events
Orlando Science Center is expanding its Astronomy Dayevent, sprinkling events over select weekends through June 2.
Activities will include SunWatch sessions, where visitors will peer at the sun through the Crosby Observatorytelescope; four NASA speakers; Orlando by Night, a live planetarium show in the Dr. Phillips CineDome; the Science on a Sphere exhibit and the Kinesthetic Astronomyprogram.
SunWatch sessions will be at 3 p.m. on May 6, 12, 13, 19, 20, 26, 27 and June 2 and 3.
On May 12, the center will host night viewing in the Crosby Observatory from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. (Note that the rest of the science center, with the exception of the planetarium, will be closed at this time.)
NASA speakers will include Jean Hill, a safety and reliability engineer at Kennedy Space Center at 2 p.m., May 5; Caley Burke, an aeorspace engineer who will discuss unmanned spacecraft at 4 p.m. on May 12; instrumentation engineer Aaron Sherman on launch systems at 2 p.m. on May 26; and Richard Johanboeke, a contracting officer who will talk about the Mars Science Laboratory at 2 p.m. on June 2.
The centers Our Planet, Our Universe area will be home to many activities such a Dr. Dares Lab, which will concentrate on astronomy and light-themed experiments.
Events are included in regular Orlando Science Center admission: $17 general, $12 ages 3-11. There is a discounted rate for folks who want only the night viewing after 5 p.m. on May 12.
For more info, go to http://www.osc.org or call 407-514-2000.
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Astronomy 10 – Lecture 29 – Video
01-12-2011 16:06 Introduction to General Astronomy
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Astronomy Cast Episode 245 – Calendars – Video
29-12-2011 14:54 This was the first recording time we've used Hangouts on Air to record a live version of Astronomy Cast. Our lives are ruled by calendars. And calendars are ruled by astronomy. As we near the end of 2011, and get ready to ring in the new year, let's discover the astronomy underlying the days, weeks, months and years that segment our lives.
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Nokia N8 Video Astronomy – Video
Top iPad Astronomy Apps – Video
13-01-2012 22:01 - Keeping its sparkling treasures just far enough out of reach to tease humanity with visions of divinity and ambition when fire was the pinnacle of modern technology, the twinkling night sky has beckoned every dreamer ever born since time began. Now that we've set foot on the Moon and sent cameras up, up, and away to send back startling glimpses of galaxies far, far away, it's easy for an Earth-bound stargazer to feel a little out of the loop. But here are couple of reasons why owning an iPad could be the next best thing to having your own Hubble Space Telescope. You can watch the entire live TLDR episode here:
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Antognini, Bird
12-04-2012 11:11 This is an OSU Astronomy "Coffee Brief" for the Antognini, Bird & Martini (2012) paper titled "The Lifetime and Powers of FR IIs in Galaxy Clusters" posted to the astro-ph archive on April 18th, 2012: Video made by Joe Antognini (OSU Astronomy).
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