Category Archive

Sometimes this blog is quiet because bad things are happening.

Sometimes this blog is quiet because good things are happening.

Sometimes this blog is quiet because there’s nothing much to say.

Sometimes nothing much to say is a good thing.

I’m settling into summer, getting the yard caught up — yanking up the little patches of poison ivy, pulling weeds from between the stones and bricks of the patio, putting in stonecrop and rhododendron… A few times already I’ve gotten a little lost in the familiar sloughs of summer boredom, but I realized, when reading this old blog entry of mine, the tremendous progress I’ve made in learning to live alone. In learning to live, period.

The author of that “old” entry not yet even a year old impresses me with the way that she reveals an embarassing amount of suffering along with a total lack of submission to it. This summer, with new job leads, deeping friendships and fair amount of fun to go along with catching up on my gutters and weeds, things already feel different. And not just because of the unreliable fix of more and better things to do.

My life is slowly deepening and enriching, changing like leaves and detritus turn to rich compost. I am back in love with my sweet house, even more in love with my city, and every day brings me greater and greater awareness of how much I love and am loved by my circle of friends.

I had dinner with a friend last night and as we walked into the restaurant we saw a dear mutual friend there with her extended family, in town for a visit. The friend I’d come with, Laura, told us all a story of a friend of hers getting sick while vacationing in a nearby town, and Laura’s journey of driving to her projectile-puking friend in need and taking her back to Laura’s condo and caring for her.

“I’d do it for you,” she said, looking at our friend and then at me, and was told right back she could expect the same from us. We all kind of turned to one another and told one another that we would all indeed drive to Cherokee to rescue each other should we ever become projectile-pukers, and cart each other back home safe and see to each other until we were well. And it was true.

The point of this nerdy story is to show that this is the kind of tribe worth waiting a lifetime for. My only regret is the constraint of geography that doesn’t allow me to widen my circle to those I would welcome but who live far away.

This is a very fine life I have, not in material riches or even that many conventional accoutrements of contentment (a husband and family, a fat salary), but in gratitude and emotional and intellectual wealth.

Yesterday I woke at 6:15, had lunch with a friend, had dinner with another friend (helper to fallen projectile-pukers everywhere) and late in the evening caught a spectacular solstice moonrise.

Last night was a good night for the fabled “moon illusion,” which according to the buzz of the astronomy newsletters I read is especially spectacular at the summer solstice:

On Wednesday night, June 18th, step outside at sunset and look around. You’ll see a giant form rising in the east. At first glance it looks like the full Moon. It has craters and seas and the face of a man, but this “moon” is strangely inflated. It’s huge!

You’ve just experienced the Moon Illusion.

The buzz was totally right.

I drove to my local eastern horizon observing spot, a gravel residential parking lot overlooking a river valley with a clear horizon view blocked only by the unavoidable ring of mountains, and was met by a few fellow nature freaks. Moonrise was at 9:14 but it took awhile for the moon to clear the dark blue peaks of the Smokies.

We weren’t quite sure where due east was until the undersides of a little bank of low, dark clouds began to glow with an eerie golden light. It was the light of the still-hidden rising moon. Soon part of it peeped, a hot molten blot of orange glowing in the dark gray, not through the clouds but in the gaps between their smoky blackness.

Though we could see little of it through the clouds, we got a breathtaking sense of the strange illusion of its size. It seemed the size of an apple or grapefruit, and glowed a magnificent yellow-orange. Bloated but more luminous than baleful, the moon was for agonizing minutes on end mostly shrouded in black clouds jaggedly backlit with a ragged fringe of gold.

We desperately wanted to see the whole moon, but the color effect of yellow-orange and deep gray was gorgeous. I found myself making impatient lifting motions with my arms, as if lifting a tarp or a sash, I wanted so bad for the bank of dark cloud to lift above that gorgeous orange solstice moon.

“It looks like a sunset,” said the woman behind me with quiet awe, her young son on her shoulders.

Eventually it broke through the clouds. I have never in my life seen a moon so bright. My eyes swam trying to focus on it, and I found myself instinctively shielding my eyes — from the moon.

We missed the best viewing as by the time it had cleared the clouds and mountains it had been rising for a good 45 minutes, and was too high in the sky for the moon illusion, an optical illusion based in the moon being low on the horizon.

But what little we saw was unforgettable. And tonight, with the moon still mostly full, I think I will slink over to another observation spot and watch the show again.

So of course this isn’t really a month where nothing is happened. It’s just a month where everything happening is quiet and small, a molten suburban moon and an excited child on his mother’s shoulders being shushed. I have lain in bed listening to a mockingbird calling for his mate in the moonlight. I finished my first case study with my new corporate client. I knitted on the grassy college quad while listening to live Latin music. And this morning, as if the beauty of the solstice moon last night were not enough to recharge my spirit, I found this:

The year’s first blossom of my well-named Queen of the Night cactus, a night-flowering cactus that must have produced its strangely alien and lunar yellow-white florescence as the moon rose last night in solstitial splendour.

Sometimes this blog is quiet when there are no stories. When the are stories, it speaks up again.

Wednesday night’s the night — a big ol’ total lunar eclipse over most of planet Earth.

Here’s a map that lets you know how much of the eclipse you can see from your part of the world. The partial eclipse begins at 8:43 EST (1:43 a.m. GMT); the total eclipse starts at 10:01 p.m. EST.

While lunar eclipses aren’t as exciting as comets or meteor showers (they’re dramatic but slow) they’re still fascinating to watch unfold.

I charge anyone who’s interested to take the JSFW Lunar Nerd Challenge: can you get someone to watch the eclipse? Can you get someone interested in what’s happening?

*******

Here’s a cool NASA article on the different colors the eclipsed moon can turn (gray, black, red and even bluish) during a total eclipse, and why.

If you recall, last year an eclipsed moon rose at sundown, ashy gray and nearly invisible, after I got myself and my blogfriends all worked up about a gigantic scarlet ball of fear, possibly including live bats and organ music, balefully marching over the horizon at sunset. Ah, well.

And as the damn thing eclipsed it just turned black. Stupid moon. Maybe this year will be different and we’ll get some Lovecraftian color action.

The word from NASA is that this is the last lunar eclipse visible in the Americas until 2010. Catch it if you can.

USA 193, a malfunctioning U.S. spy satellite (not something you see flying over the house every day), is currently circling the earth in a low orbit, appearing overhead at night as bright as a first- or second-magnitude star.

Spaceweather has more details.

You can use Heavens-Above, a website that lets users look up skywatching info for their exact viewing site, to look up exact US 193 flyby times in your city. Word is is that the satellite streaks by fast, not with the slow pace I’m used to observing from satellite-spotting in the yard. It’s visible in the Asheville area on Feb. 16, 17 and 18.

Today the Pentagon announced plans to blow US 193 up before it reenters the atmosphere.

From Heavens-Above:

Launch

USA 193 was launched on December 14th, 2006 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The launch vehicle was a Delta II. Shortly after reaching obit, ground controllers lost the ability to control the satellite, and have never regained it.

Purpose

The exact design and purpose of USA 193 are, or course, closely guarded secrets, but specialists believe it is probably a high resolution radar satellite which was intended to produce images for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

When and where will it hit the Earth ?

This is the question which interests most people, and unfortunately very difficult to answer. The satellite is being slowed down by friction with the tenuous upper atmosphere and losing height steadily, as can be seen in the plot below, which shows the orbital height over the last year. As it sinks further, the atmospheric density increases and so does the friction, making the descent faster and faster. Re-entry will happen when the height reaches about 100km.

I plan to try to catch it whizzing by, and when I do I know I’ll relive the days when Skylab was falling, way back in the summer of 1979, when my mom, in an act of kindness I have never forgotten, drove her 10-year-old daughter around suburban Greensboro after dark, hoping to catch a glimpse of a falling man-made star.

Thanks, Mom.

From spaceweather.com:

MOON AND MARS: Please don’t miss this: At sunset on Sunday, Dec. 23rd, the full Moon and Mars will rise in the east less than two degrees apart. So close together, the two brightest objects in the evening sky look absolutely dynamite. The display will be visible all night long, even from brightly lit cities, and requires no telescope to enjoy.

There’s also a full moon Christmas Eve.

From space.com:

Mark your calendar: The best meteor shower of 2007 peaks on Friday, December 14th.

(That’s tonight actually, because the peak is after midnight, though the show starts around 10 p.m., again according to space.com.)

If you plan to watch this year’s Geminid meteor shower, you’ll want clear, dark skies, ideally away from city lights (though I consistently see meteors from my back yard, fairly close to my city’s small downtown). Nature is not cooperating here in Asheville this year, where’s it’s misty, drizzly and gray, and I am disgustedly sitting this shower out.

From my local radio observatory, the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute:

The Geminid Meteor Shower is one of the more reliable showers and we should see some Geminids for a couple of mornings before the 14th and a morning or two afterwards. Successful observing of the Geminids can start as early as 10 p.m. and continue until dawn as the constellation of Gemini the twins rises higher in the sky. One should observe from a clear, dark location with a good horizon. Look high in the northeast for meteors appearing to radiate out of Gemini.

PARI also notes, interestingly, that this shower is not the result of cometary debris (which I thought was the cause of all meteor showers). This one’s from the dust traces left by an asteroid, 3200 Phaethon.

My favorite quote about “The Secret“:

“Like mastering the will through self-hypnosis or better negotiating through body language, the ‘power of positive thinking‘ has nearly a century-old track record among car dealers, admen, and others for whom attitude means as much as, if not more than, attributes. It’s from this universe of phantom values and socially constructed truths that The Secret derives its ultimate power.”

- Douglas Rushkoff, from his Discover magazine column, “New Pseudoscience Patina, Same Snake Oil”

My second favorite quote:

The “Secret” is, you’re dumb.

- my friend Annie

Via Chet Raymo’s wonderful Science Musings Blog:

For thirty-seven years, I have lived part of each year on the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland. Four books have emerged from this landscape — two non-fiction, two fiction — and more essays than I can count. All of them have begun in the landscape itself: the rock, the wet, the flora and fauna, the wind, the stars, the layers upon layers of human habitation. To this topography I have brought my own concerns, most especially this one: Learning to stand astonished in a world without miracles. I have tried to take the best of my religious heritage — Roman Catholicism — and marry it to the skeptical empiricism of my scientific education. “Nothing is too wonderful to be true,” wrote the early 19th-century physicist Michael Faraday. I would turn the phrase on its ear: Nothing is too true to be wonderful.

And speaking of standing astonished, there’s an early-morning total lunar eclipse Tuesday morning with totality at 9:52 UT/5:52 AM EDT.

Science’s pit bull, the unflinching Richard Dawkins, has a brand-new two-part BBC TV series, The Enemies of Reason. Part I, which premiered on August 13, has been uploaded to YouTube in five parts.

Irrationality is woven into the fabric of modern life. We unthinkingly indulge unscientific delusion. Astrology is so pervasive that just about everyone has been indoctrinated with the alleged character of their star sign.

[Astrology] was developed in the second century by the philosopher Claudius Ptolemy and has not moved on since…despite a shift in the Earth’s rotational axis that has thrown Ptolemy’s zodiac out by 20 degrees.

“I think if I were talking to someone in the spirit world I’d say things like, What’s it like being dead? Can you see the whole of the universe? Why do you ask them such banal questions?”

(Fellow Americans, can you imagine a program like this being shown on American television — and paid for with taxpayers’ money?)

In related news, Richard Dawkins is the bomb:

In my back yard there’s a sort of little valley that when you lie in it makes a sort of natural seat, a hard and grassy chair. Tonight I’ll lay out a blanket and bring some snacks and pillows (and mosquito repellent), and sit there in the darkness waiting.

This weekend is the Perseid meteor shower, typically the best and brightest show all year. Prime viewing locations are North America and Western Europe.

More here from NASA.

Here’s a YouTube clip of a GOP presidential candidate debate in which three candidates answer that they do not:

Much more worth reading here from the excellent Cosmic Variance.

Denial of the standard scientific explanation for the origin of human beings is a particularly dangerous kind of mistake: one based on a decision to put aside evidence and deduction in favor of wishful thinking, and an insistence on a picture of the universe that flatters ourselves. The kind of reasoning that leads one to conclude that we can’t explain human evolution without invoking a meddlesome God is the same kind of reasoning that makes people think that cutting taxes will decrease the federal deficit, or that the people of Iraq would throw candy and greet us as liberators. (I’m sure that liberals are just as susceptible to such a fallacy, but it’s the conservative versions that are currently getting us in such a mess.) It’s a refusal to take reality at face value, in favor of a picture that conforms to what we want to be true.

I wasn’t there (I was at home, wishing I was there, sitting on the sofa knitting a sock and watching Singin’ In the Rain), but the report from the Astronomy Club of Asheville is that last night’s event was…

a resounding success!

There were several big scopes and a TeleVue 5 inch APO refractor. Around 600-1000 Ashevilleans showed up to view the stars, and the iridium flare flared above the mountain right on time, no doubt to oohs and ahs.

The hit of the night was a 3 1/2-year-old girl who started shouting “I SAW THE MOON! I SAW THE MOON!” and “everyone caught her enthusiasm a dozen times over!”

It was such a huge success that the group is thinking of sponsoring another citywide astronomy event in summer, and having several planned events throughout the year.

I went to an astronomy camp as a kid, and what I saw there through telescopes stayed with me the rest of my life. I am delighted that there may be a new regular astronomy event downtown (at the un-astronomical hour of 9PM, which even I can handle).

I’ll post as the new astronomy events are planned.

(Shown: a geneticist looking ridiculously intrepid.)

I’ve got another doc to recommend: Journey of Man, a geneticist’s journey to understand the paths of the first human migrations out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago. It’s narrated by geneticist Spencer Wells, who trekked the world taking blood from people in remote places, searching for genetic markers that would indicate that early humans had passed through certain areas as they left Africa to populate the world.

As the doc starts, we understand that the first evidence of humans outside of Africa appears in — of all places — Anne’s homeworld of Australia, 6,000 miles away from Africa across the open ocean. How did the early humans get there? What route did they take, and would people along the way still hold genetic clues that some of the first humans passed through 400 centuries ago, leaving a few of their group behind to stay?

Wells goes all over the world to find out, to India and Kyrgyzstan and Africa, even to the freezing Siberian steppes of the nomadic Chuckchi people, the “cousins” of all truly native North Americans. According to Wells the Chuckchi stayed in Siberia while others in the same group kept going, eventually becoming the Inuit, Incas, Aztecs and American Indians.

The doc is — my favorite thing — thought provoking. We are all, as Wells says, essentially African. To me it’s a documentary about race, really, about how “race” is just a snapshot of the long unending action of evolution, a living creature’s adaptation to the climate where her people find themselves. We look the way we look so we can maximize our chances for survival, so our skins can help us make all the Vitamin D we need. We are tall or short depending on how cold it is where our people stay long; short people have less surface area through which to lose precious heat to a cold environment. Start out relatively tall and brown as the Cro-Magnon people did, and cold, it seems, will eventually make you short and fair.

All it takes is a few thousand years.

The doc made me laugh a little at the idea that some races are smarter than others. For that to be true, I guess there’d have to be some part of the Earth that presented no challenge to the people who lived there, some place where, for tens of thousands of years, food and water just magically appeared and no hungry predators prowled about looking for the tasty meat of hairless upright primates. For there to be a whole race of people who are all pretty stupid, stupidity would have to have been selected over tens of thousands of years as a genetic trait that better enabled survival.

Watch a doc, come up with all kinds of things to think about.

Highly recommended.

The 1st Annual International Sidewalk Astronomy Night is this Saturday, May 19.

Asheville is definitely observing.

The Astronomy Club of Asheville will be set up in front of Pack Place on the brick promenade at 9PM with two big telescopes, looking at Saturn, the Beehive cluster and the waxing crescent moon. As a big and perfectly-timed bonus, there will be a bright iridium satellite flare at 10:36PM over downtown Asheville, right over Beaucatcher Mountain as viewed from Pack Place!

Come on out and enjoy a rare free, local, public chance to check out the heavens through a 10″ Dobson scope.

The May 19th event is weather permitting with Sunday the 20th as the backup night if Saturday is rainy or overcast.

Other participating cities are listed here (the left sidebar has other areas than the U.S.).

This photograph was taken on May 19th, 2005 by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. It’s an image of sunset on Mars.

Click the image to see a higher resolution.

Via Mars TV:

This Panoramic Camera (Pancam) mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover’s 489th martian day, or sol. Spirit was commanded to stay awake briefly after sending that sol’s data to the Mars Odyssey orbiter just before sunset. This small panorama of the western sky was obtained using Pancam’s 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer color filters. This filter combination allows false color images to be generated that are similar to what a human would see, but with the colors slightly exaggerated…Because Mars is farther from the Sun than the Earth is, the Sun appears only about two-thirds the size that it appears in a sunset seen from the Earth.

Via Chet Raymo and Boing Boing, here are some images from a new book of photography called The Deep, “featuring 220 color photographs of deep ocean species, some photographed for the first time.” These creatures live thousands of meters below the surface of the ocean. PW starred review.

Official website here.

More images here.

I liked this post from one of the bloggers of Cosmic Variance about a visit to her daughter’s kindergarten class, where she led a sing-along of a 1959 educational science recording as covered by They Might Be Giants.

Listen to the TMBG version here. It’s a cute, catchy basic education in Sun science.

I remember from my first astronomy class how disappointed I was that we were actually going to spend time learning about our local solar system and not rush headlong into sexier things like quasars and Herbig-Haro objects. But my favorite part of the class (aside from star formation) ended up being the section where we focused on some basic science I’d never before even thought to learn about — the science of my very own sun.

Why Does the Sun Shine? (The Sun Is a Mass of Incandescent Gas)

The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
where hydrogen is built into helium
at a temperature of millions of degrees

Yo-ho it’s hot
The Sun is not
a place where we could live
but here on earth there’d be no life without the light it gives

We need its light
We need its heat
We need its energy

Without the Sun
Without a doubt
There’d be no you and me

The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
where hydrogen is built into helium
at a temperature of millions of degrees

The Sun is hot…

It is so hot that everything on it is a gas
Iron
Copper
Aluminum
and many others

The Sun is large…

If the Sun were hollow a million earths could fit inside
and yet the Sun is only a middle-sized star

The Sun is far away…

About 93 million miles away!
And that’s why it looks so small

And even when it’s out of sight
the Sun shines night and day

The Sun gives heat
The Sun gives light
The sunlight that we see
The sunlight comes from our own sun’s atomic energy

Scientists have found that the Sun is a huge atom-smashing machine
The heat and light of the Sun come from the nuclear reactions of
Hydrogen
Carbon
Nitrogen
and Helium

The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
where hydrogen is built into helium
at a temperature of millions of degrees

I love it when nature makes clean and intuitive shapes, forms that look like there should be some sentient organizer behind them.

This is an infrared image of the Red Square Nebula.

According to Space.com, “new findings suggest the system’s perfect form results from an even outflow of gas.”

“If you fold things across the principle diagonal axis, you get an almost perfect reflection symmetry,” said study leader Peter Tuthill from the University of Sydney in Australia. “This makes the Red Square nebula the most symmetrical object of comparable complexity ever imaged.”

There’s also a Red Rectangle Nebula.

Via Cosmic Variance, every known thing in the solar system that is bigger than 200 miles across, from the mighty Sun to an asteroid called 511 Davida:

The 88 biggest objects.

• one star
• four gas giant planets
• four rocky terrestrial planets
• three dwarf planets
• 12 moons
• 4 asteroids
• and 51 TNOs (trans-Neptunian objects)

Fun to scroll through.

Today in my POLS 380: Globalization and Its Critics class, we watched most of What’s Up With the Weather, a NOVA video on global warming and the greenhouse effect. If you’ve been looking for a collection of scientific facts about the debate and the climate mechanisms that actually cause the greenhouse effect, look here. This is a short, well-written and science-based documentary full of relevant and unbiased information, presented in a format that is interesting and involving.

If you want to start educating yourself about global warming, I recommend starting here. When the class period ended, the video still had about 15 minutes to go and the class enthusiastically wanted to see the rest.

Here’s the NOVA site.

You can get the video new on Amazon for 18 bucks, from Netflix, or maybe even from your local library.

Recommended by Jen and Subramaniam!

Via SpaceWeather.com:

We’ve never seen anything like it on any other planet,” says atmospheric scientist Kevin Baines of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It is a hexagon twice as wide as Earth encircling Saturn’s north pole.

More here.

Official NASA press release on the hexagon here.

NASA video of the hexagon here.

Last night’s eclipse wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I’d read that the rising eclipsed moon would resemble a “dim, sooty and eerily illuminated mottled softball,” but in WNC it was a barely visible ghost of a moon. It looked like a faded wisp of cloud in the blue of twilight, and you had to look very carefully to notice it at all. The rising eclipsed moon was neither the blood-red of Pyracantha’s Italian moon nor a “mottled softball,” but a faded blue-white ghost, very hard to find.

As night fell things got interesting. In all the eclipses I’d seen before the eclipsed moon turned orange-red. This one was different, with the eclipsed part of the moon not red but black, making the moon just look like an oddly shaped waning moon. From my vantage spot at the eastern horizon I drove to my local health food store, and was delighted to notice that the people inside were talking about the eclipse, and that two store workers outside had paused to watch. Everyone was noticing. And I got to see a new kind of eclipse, one where the eclipsed bit of the moon turns black.

Over in England, though, it looks like people got a red eclipse. Look at this!

More great eclipse pics from all over the world here.

Here’s where you can see it:

And here’s eclipse times in GMT:

Moon enters penumbra: 2018

Moon enters umbra: 2130

Totality begins: 2244

Mid-eclipse: 2321

Totality ends: 2358

Moon leaves umbra: 0111

Moon leaves penumbra: 0224

Time zone converter here.

Yesterday I found an unlikely viewing spot in the parking lot of my local Ingles grocery, which has the best eastern horizon view I was able to find on short notice. Luckily for me I recently had dinner with a friend in the building next door to the Ingles, and by chance noticed that our seat by the window offered a rare prime horizon view of a golden and slowly rising full moon. Hell, if I’m hungry at six, I may even watch the moonrise over dinner.

I’ll head to my viewing spot a little after six hoping to catch the rising eclipsed moon before sunset. Moonrise in WNC is 6:18 PM. Sunset is 6:27 PM. What I’ll be able to see before sunset I honestly don’t know.

I’d like to issue a science-nerd challenge to the readers of this blog, one that I will take up as well. Can we all try to interest someone in watching the eclipse? A neighbor, a friend, a random redneck wondering why you are standing in the Ingles parking lot? For whatever reason, I find that most people don’t even know about eclipses. Most people don’t look to the sky. Tonight’s a good night to show wonders to the uninitiated.

Happy viewing, everyone!

A total lunar eclipse is one of my favorite nature happenings to watch. The viewer knows precisely when it’s going to happen (no standing around waiting for it, like with meteors), you frequently don’t even have to stay up past midnight, and there’s no need for driving deep into the country for dark-sky viewing. You can watch an eclipse for awhile, pop back inside to warm up on the sofa, have a cup of tea and then step back out. Lunar eclipses take hours to complete, and you can watch them in a leisurely and unhurried way.

The weather forecast for Saturday, March 3 in my part of the world is chilly and partly cloudy — but there’s time for change, and I’m hoping for warm and clear weather in time for the total eclipse of the moon happening in the eastern half of the U.S., Africa and Europe that evening.

This eclipse will be unlike any lunar eclipse I’ve ever observed before. Eclipses I’ve watched all started after full dark. But for this one, totality — the time when the moon is at its darkest and most fully eclipsed by the Earth — starts at 5:44 EST, before moonrise in my area. The moon rises that day around 6:18 PM, about halfway through totality, and according to the data on space.com, it will stay dark and totally eclipsed for a good half an hour. So the full moon this Saturday over WNC will rise at sunset, already fully eclipsed (creepy!). Even with half the show already over by moonrise, it’ll be an awesome sight I won’t even have to stay up late for.

This is my kind of entertainment.

If you’ve never seen a total eclipse of the moon before, it’s a strange and beautiful sight. The eclipsed moon doesn’t turn the gray-black of the dark part of the waning moon, but an unexpected rusty red-orange. A bloody, earthy color. Well, according to space.com the eclipsed moon actually can turn dark, with the eclipsed part nearly indistinguishable from the black night sky, but the eclipses I’ve observed all look more like the image below:

How is that going to look slouching balefully over the horizon this weekend?

While watching the last total lunar eclipse from my front yard two and a half years ago, I noticed that just as totality began, red light began reflecting from satellites flying overhead and the sky was suddenly full of tiny red dots traveling with a strangely constant speed. It only lasted a few seconds, but was unforgettably odd. I’ll look for that again this weekend.

Total lunar eclipses are ridiculously easy to watch. If you want to enjoy this one, make a mental note to step outside after sunset this Saturday and find the moon. It’ll be the big weird red thing. Since you’ll be looking for the rising moon, ideally you will want an unobstructed view of the eastern horizon. But since the moon eventually rises overhead, you don’t really need to go anywhere special, and don’t need to use special viewing equipment, although binoculars are not a bad idea. Usually I watch for awhile (eclipses take hours — this is a truncated one at three hours), go back inside and hang out, and then step back out to see the changes. I wander in and out all during the eclipse, coming inside to surf the net and pet cats and then coming back out to lean on my car or just stand the road or in the middle of my back yard. Looking up.

Here’s space.com’s guide to the eclipse, with more information on viewing times.

Unfortunately, this eclipse will not be viewable for those living in the western United States and Canada, as the eclipse will have pretty much ended by the time the moon rises there. But as space.com says, As a consolation…the next total eclipse later this year (on Aug. 27) will favor these locations.

This one’s for the eastern half of the U.S. and Europe. It’s this coming Saturday, March 3, with totality beginning at 5:44 PM EST, 22:44 GMT.

I’ll be watching.

Via Cosmic Variance, a really good collaborative physics blog, I found a post about the work of Felice Frankel, a research scientist and science photographer who made the beautiful image of a ferrofluid above.

What I find so compelling about this post are Frankel’s interesting position that she is not an artist (I strongly disagree — and I have a feeling my whole life is going to be art guided by science, and that the work I do will somehow be both), and the poster’s take on what is “true” with regard to depicting the natural world.

In watching the magnificent Walking With… BBC series on the prehistoric world, I found myself confounded by how much of the script was imagination, and how much was based on compelling evidence from the natural world and the fossil record. But the fact remains that the show is interesting and invigorating science, just exactly the kind of thing that converts a bright and imginative child to paleontology or scientific visualization on the spot. Is this series somehow both art and science, legitimately both? I think it is. I think it’s a perfect example of a place where the two disciplines meet, and respect and assist one another as they collaborate.

In his post, Daniel of Cosmic Variance mentions how astronomical images are altered, with nonvisible elements like infrared radiation shown, color manipulated, etc. What you would see if you looked through through Hubble yourself, and what we see in digitally manipulated Hubble photos are often completely different. And the photos aren’t manipulated primarily to make them “prettier,” but to make them more understandable. Different gases are shown in different colors. Light frequencies that are invisible to the eye are made visible. Scientific integrity is arguably preserved, but the images are changed, their elements made more understandable, and sometimes, yes, the images are prettier.

Read the post here.

Art and science are not mutually exclusive. There are places where they meet and work together. Art and science can and should and do work together, and science is not “contaminated” by being presented as compelling, interesting and full of life, color, wonder and beauty. A research scientist can make art, no matter how unwilling she might be to call her work that, and to call herself an artist. There’s neither snobbery nor pretense in a statement that merely delivers the truth.

Last night I watched Walking with Monsters, part of the BBC’s outstanding Walking With… series on prehistoric life. I just can’t say enough about how much I have enjoyed the two installments of the series I’ve seen, which use big-budget state-of-the-art animatronics and CGI to imagine the lives of prehistoric animals. You just won’t BELIEVE how weird this world is. Fifteen-foot millipedes, horrid venomous night-hunting reptiles (nightmarish!), giant sea scorpions, polar jungles… Our world is just a flash in time, and there is so much that came before us that we know almost nothing about.

This series takes real liberties by imagining much, and not creating its world solely from the limited information we have on the prehistoric world. While I still wish that there was some kind of disclaimer informing the viewer of this directly, it’s enough, I suppose, simply to know that this series is where human imagination and science meet to bring the ancient world imperfectly but magnificently alive. It might not have been that way. But we don’t know exactly how it was, so why not imagine a world that could have been? The series sparks the imagination, and all of its creatures are real animals that once roamed the planet.

I can’t recommend this series highly enough. It’s fascinating and dramatic, and the world it depicts — our own Earth, so very long ago — is far stranger than you can imagine. You just won’t believe the crazy creatures hidden 300 million years back in our family tree. Yes, ours — mine and yours — for many of these strange ancient creatures are the ancestors of human beings.

Our branch of the tree of life goes back a lot farther than the prehistoric African hominids. That’s just where we became human. We weren’t always human. What were were before we stood upright? Reptiles? Amphibians? Fish in the sea?

All of the above.

If you lived in New Zealand, this is what you’d see as the sun set:

From Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, an animation that shows 4 billion years of human evolution, from the “primordial soup” to Homo Sapiens. Somebody needs to redo this in CGI.

Watch from the six-minute mark to see the whole thing in 40 seconds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMHNnhAEDN4

What’s the biggest carnivore that ever lived? Tyrannosaurus, right? Nope.

The biggest of the carnivores was a whale-like marine carnivore called liopleurodon. Or at least that’s what I learned from Walking With Dinosaurs, the popular 4-hour BBC series about the lives of dinosaurs that according to Wikipedia is the most expensive documentary ever made.

A little research shows me that liopleurodon really is bigger than T. Rex, and so far really does seem to be the biggest carnivore that ever lived.

It’s big enough to bite a car in half.

Despite shakiness on some facts (like presenting the liopleurodon as being a lot bigger than it probably was), the series offers visual effects that are absolutely stunning. If you saw Jurassic Park in the theatre when it first came out, you remember how amazing the effects were, how convincing. The dinosaurs were real. They breathed and snorted, bellowed, ran.

In some scenes these dinosaurs are like that, that lifelike. The illusion — created from puppetry and CGI on real backgrounds of desert, forest, ocean — is weaker because it is extended for a longer period, and not always quite as convincing. But with only a slight suspension of disbelief you feel like you are watching a nature program that just happens to be filmed millions of years before there would have been anyone around to film it.

The POV and narration are intentionally and cleverly just like a TV nature show’s, and you see early mammals in their burrows raising their young, sea mammals giving birth, tiny little foraging reptiles building nests and repelling predators… The illusion of life can be quite convincing. I gave in to it, and watched the show as if it were a nature program.

Which it both is and isn’t. Despite the fact that prominent paleontologists were brought in as advisors, apparently some information is scientifically specious. For example, scary liopleurodon (pictured above), a huge, fascinating and frightening marine carnivore, isn’t nearly as large as the series says it is (it’s probably closer to 15 meters long than 25 meters, a huge error). So I wonder how much else is exaggerated or wrong, and I wonder how the series can really recreate the mating habits of ornithocheiros, a flying dinosaur. How do we know that ornithocheiros flew from Brazil to Europe to mate on the beach, the males forming a circle with the weakest on the outskirts and the strong young ones in the center, and the females scoping the males out from the air?

But sometimes even I have to give in to not knowing where the meal comes from and just enjoy the delicious flavors. This series is remarkable for bringing the ancient past vibrantly alive. Dinosaurs as wildlife! For that’s what they are: ancient wildlife. The factual errors don’t outweigh the value of the feeling of connection to the ancient past that this series offers to the viewer.

And as you watch the series, you realize how ancient some modern species are. When the ancestors of human beings were rodentlike early mammals living in burrows, there were ferns, wasps, sharks, flowers, dragonflies, horseshoe crabs… There are so many familiar flora and fauna whose forms are so much more ancient than ours, who shared the Earth with completely alien creatures like liopleurodon.

The show posits that 100 million years ago, when there were no polar caps, the south polar region was a humid jungle for months on end, then a frozen jungle for months on end. It was perhaps inhabited by Koolasuchus, a 1000-pound carnivorous amphibian.

Incredible. Kevin Kelly is also a fan of the series.

Here’s a clip:

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/239141/jurassic_sea_monster/

Another clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzkvJDnjh6c&mode=related&search=

I think this would be a great program for older kids to watch — I only rule out sensitive younger ones because of the killing-and-eating factor, and the dino-sex.

The 2006 Leonid meteor shower is this Saturday (Nov. 18), and some are saying it could be an impressive one. Here’s a few articles/guides, if you’re interested in learning more about how to view the shower and what kind of activity there will be in your part of the world:

http://www.space.com/spacewatch/061114_leonid_news.html

http://www.space.com/spacewatch/061117_leonid_guide.html

Peak viewing time is 11:45 EST, which means that I actually might be able to catch a few meteors before bed. I love to watch meteor showers, and I woke at around 5AM for the amazing 2001 Leonid meteor storm, which was unforgettable. I lived about a quarter-mile from downtown Charlotte NC in 2001, and there was horrible light pollution in my viewing area. But I knew that this wasn’t going to be any typical meteor event, and it might be worthwhile even with serious light pollution affecting my viewing.

What people saw who watched under dark skies, I can’t even imagine. The show was spectacular even in a semi-urban backyard a quarter-mile from the city center. I lay in my nightgown on a chaise longue on the patio, freezing cold, watching colored streaks cross the night sky. Purple, green, and one golden fireball. I’d never seen colored meteors before. Amazing.

This shower won’t be anything like that. But since this is an “early” shower, with peak viewing around midnight, I’ll probably go for it.

If you want to watch a meteor shower, I say get horizontal. You need to be able to stare at the sky for long stretches, and craning your neck back will become tiresome. I like a lounge chair like you’d lie on the beach on, and I have one specifically for skywatching. Dress warmly and cover yourself with blankets. You’ll want to be warm and comfy when the stars start to fall.

As part of New Scientist magazine’s 50th anniversary, the NS editors asked 50 scientists to forecast the next 50 years. The respondents make for quite a list: Stephen Wolfram, Lisa Randall, Gerard ‘t Hooft, Edward Witten, Freeman Dyson, Kip Thorne…

The responses are brief — 1-3 short paragraphs — and make for entertaining reading. What struck me as most interesting was not the predictions themselves, but how so many of these famous scientists are convinced that the most exciting science of the future lies in their fields. Mandelbrot believes that fractal geometry is about to have an “increasingly central role” (I’ll buy that, actually); Wolfram believes that the excitement lies in the exploration of the “computational universe” (and also that kids 50 years from now will learn cellular automata before they do algebra).

Freeman Dyson thinks that by 2056 we will find evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Interesting stuff.

This morning I volunteered at “Super Saturday,” a college event where UNCA students and faculty teach a series of Saturday morning classes for academically gifted area gradeschool kids in 3rd-8th grade. There are all kinds of cool classes offered — math, acting, cartooning, calligraphy, chess, chemistry… As a chemistry major, I volunteered with the chemistry department for the “Chemistry Matters” class.

It started out very lamely. I remember thinking if I was a parent, I’d have wanted my money back. The young student teaching was just a total teenaged goofball, unprepared, sending people back to his apartment to get what he didn’t bring, no gift for explanation or creating drama or interest… I resigned myself to a dull morning.

And then the magic happened. We brought out the liquid nitrogen. As my friend Sherman said to me when I bumped into him after the class, “It ain’t a party until you bring the liquid nitrogen out.” That shit is amazing. If I sold it, I would call my brand Liquid Cool.

Liquid nitrogen is so cold that it boils at well below room temperature. Dip something into it, even in its boiling state, and whatever you dunk will soon freeze solid, as the temperature of liquid nitrogen is 320 degrees below zero. Very, very cold.

You can’t get liquid nitrogen just anywhere. You have to have a license or something. So if you are a college student and your university’s got a license, and you’ve got all the liquid nitro you can mess around with in an hour, you are in for good times. Especially when you throw in 16 crazy little brainy preteen kids. Liquid nitrogen, BTW, is not an expensive substance. At about a buck for a glassful, it’s as cheap as soda. So we could fucking go for it. And we did.

First we poured it all over the place. On the table, on the floor… The nitrogen pours out of the canister just like water would, and it looks like water, but has a strange smoky, cloudy translucence. It steams and boils when it hits the air, and if you pour it it makes roiling waves of smoky white cloud on the floor. If you’ve ever seen special-effects fog from a dry-ice fog machine, it looks like that. Little bits of nitrogen ice spray out from where the liquid hits the floor, skittering away and sublimating (the fancy science word for what happens when a solid goes straight to a gaseous stage without ever really melting).

It doesn’t wet anything in our everyday world to pour liquid nitrogen on it. Everything in our everyday world is so much hotter than the liquid nitrogen that the liquid nitrogen boils away on contact. Pouring liquid nitrogen onto something only makes it turn cold, not wet. When you pour liquid nitrogen onto a tabletop, there is no wet spot. Only a dry spot of freezing cold.

Dr. Heard, UNCA’s jolly Australian chemistry prof (pretty much just along for the ride, with some of his students in charge of the class), did his shtick, which is to pretend to drink liquid nitrogen. Now obviously he wasn’t really drinking it, but he raised the insulated canister to his lips, tipped it back, and then lowered it, smacking his lips with satisfaction as big curls of white steam puffed out of his mouth (I feel certain that the trick here is to just inhale the steam as you pretend to drink). Great stuff!

And then we made liquid nitrogen ice cream. It’s the easiest ice cream recipe of all. Just mix your ingredients (cream, sugar, flavorings — we made cinnamon ice cream) and then pour in a few big splashes of liquid nitrogen and stir well! It seems like eating ice cream made with liquid nitrogen would kill you unless you were from the ice-planet of Zorg, but it doesn’t. In fact it was quite tasty. The cold liquid nitrogen just freezes the cream and boils harmlessly away (colorless, odorless nitrogen, hardly a poisonous gas, is in your lungs right now and comprises about 80% of Earth’s atmosphere). After a few minutes of stirring, your bowl of cream and sugar is now marvelously smooth and rich instant homemade ice cream. Damn!

We also froze an onion and busted it on the floor. Science! To do this, you submerge your onion in a big beaker of liquid nitrogen until it freezes solid. This looks really cool, as the onion — much hotter than the freezing nitrogen — makes the liquid in the beaker immediately come to a hard rolling boil. It looks for all the world like a beaker of boiling water, but there’s no heat source under it. It never ceases to delight me to be reminded that water’s boiling point is not the only boiling point in town. Liquid nitrogen begins to boil at 78 degrees above absolute zero. At room temperature, it smokes and steams and bubbles like a witch’s cauldron. Plop an onion in a beaker full and you get an instantaneous hard boil. The nitrogen is freezing cold, cold enough to freeze your finger solid if you held it in there, but boiling away into gas.

So what happens when you freeze an onion that way? And then awesomely hurl it into the linoleum floor of the chemistry department hallway? It (the onion) doesn’t quite shatter like glass, sad to say. Ours had only frozen to a hard and clunky lump of oniony ice, like an old snowball left out overnight. A second throw got it to shatter into a hundred chunks, which soon unfroze and made the hallway smell like a dirty armpit. Guess what volunteer got to clean that up?

A second onion was allowed to “boil” a little longer. The student teacher meant business this time, and threw it hard at the floor, where it broke into proper onion-shards with a tinkling smashing sound.

The kids loved it. I don’t know how much science they learned (quite possibly a fair amount), but they had a cool experience with an unusual substance, got to see a college chemistry lab, and ate alien ice cream frozen by the magic of chemistry. If I was a kid, I’d never forget it. I’m 37 and I still had a great time.

(And I looked, as I always look, at how many boys and how many girls there were in the class. Eight of each, split right down the middle. Just as it should be.)

David Byrne (yes, Talking Heads David Byrne) has a blog, David Byrne Journal (now that’s my kind of title). I find it engaging, intelligent, thoughtful, unpretentious, and well-written. Byrne doesn’t post daily, but his weekly-ish posts are worth waiting for.

What a smart, cool, and interesting man he is.

His last two posts (one on how easily some logical people can suspend rationality and why; one on the visitation of a little bird into his home) are lovely:

The Secret Commonwealth

Daydreaming

Pictured above is one of the Cottingley Fairies images. Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously believed in these fairies and championed their existence. Byrne shares some marvelous ideas as to why completely unconvincing photos of posed paper cutouts so easily convinced Doyle of the reality of fairies.

Here are some great hi-res Cottingley fairy images. Honestly, Sir Arthur.

A nerdy treat from PBS airs tonight at 8PM: Monster of the Milky Way.  It’s about the search for black holes like the supermassive one that astronomers believe lurks at the center of our own galaxy.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blackhole/

I’ve got to work at the god damned computer lab until 8PM tonight, which pretty much decided me not to decorate for Halloween this year. <huge sigh of disappointment> For me to not even carve a pumpkin is a first, but I’ve been beat and was bummed to know I’d miss most of the trick-or-treat action while stuck in the computer lab.

And dammit, I kept a movie too long and now won’t have my Hammer Netflix selections here for Halloween! The bad planning of the mentally exhausted. Who ever heard of watching David Copperfield for Halloween? Oh God, somebody get me some chocolate.

I’m gonna have to hit Orbit DVD to try to snag something to watch tonight to salvage what shreds I can of my favorite holiday. I really hope they’ve got Curse of the Werewolf.

Look at the two crescents in this picture: the long pale thin one and the smaller one cozying up to the thin one’s center. Can you guess what they are?

From the Astronomy Picture of the Day, some incredible images from the Cassini-Huygens mission:

In the shadow of Saturn, unexpected wonders appear. The robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn recently drifted in giant planet’s shadow for about 12 hours and looked back toward the eclipsed Sun. Cassini saw a view unlike any other. First, the night side of Saturn is seen to be partly lit by light reflected from its own majestic ring system.

Higher-res images here and here.

I’ve posted before about What the #$*! Do We Know!?, a movie that was marketed as being about quantum physics, but that is directed and produced by followers of a woman who claims to channel a 35,000-year-old spirit named Ramtha. In other words, it’s a science movie created by members of an organization that purports to teach clairvoyance and telepathy at eight-day workshops.

Though it’s presented as popular science, it’s not. The movie is a jumble of good science, bad science, dishonest editing of at least one scientist’s words, and some very disingenuous stealth advertising for the Ramtha School of Enlightenment (and, indirectly, for the School’s $700-$1000 workshops).

Sensible people watch this movie because they think they’re getting a fun and acccessible introduction to quantum physics. But that’s not what they get. So where can a curious lay person learn the basics of what we understand about the quantum world?

I emailed friends and the physicist-bloggers behind Cosmic Variance and the n-Category Cafe for suggestions, and this is what I came up with: a list of books, documentaries and television programs that I hope offers what What the Bleep only pretends to. Any stupidity or error in this post is mine, and not that of the friends and physics professionals who so kindly offered me help.

A subject as complex as quantum theory could never be made easy. It’s an area worthy of a lifetime of study. But if your lifetime is otherwise engaged, here are some ideas how to spend a few weeks, months, or Sunday afternoons on the couch.

Enjoy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Space has a smell? Apparently it does, and according to space tourist Anousheh Ansari, it smells “like burned almond cookie[s].” Via Boing Boing, from Ansari’s blog:

The time went by really slowly, but finally the moment arrived and they were ready to open the hatch. Mike and Misha called me closer and told me to take a good whiff because this would be the first time I would smell “SPACE.”

They said it is a very unique smell. As they pulled the hatch open on the Soyuz side, I smelled “SPACE.” It was strange… kind of like burned almond cookie. I said to them, “It smells like cooking” and they both looked at me like I was crazy and exclaimed:”Cooking!”

I said, “Yes… sort of like something is burning… I don’t know it is hard to explain…”

She’s not the first to describe the smell of space this way, as something burned. When Terry Gross of Fresh Air interviewed astronaut Jerry Linenger in 2001, she asked him what outer space smelled like. Here’s his response:

Flying into Mir, it smells sort of like dirty sweat socks in a guys’ locker room. Actual smell of space, though, that’s a very interesting question. When we would open a hatch, for example, that was exposed to the vacuum of space, uh, there’s always a double hatch, and so you open the one hatch, you now have the pure smell of space. And it’s a uh, tough — you know, any aroma is tough to describe, but it has a distinct smell, and it’s sort of a burned-out, uh, after-the-fire, the next-morning-in-your-fireplace sort of smell. And that’s the real smell of the vacuum of space.

NOTE 10/30/06: John Baez’ comment below made me ask myself if this burned-out smell is the smell of “the vacuum of space” or the smell of the space around Mir– the scent of a space program rather than the real “smell of space.”

Today a group of scientists and concerned citizens launch a new organization, Scientists and Engineers for America, dedicated to electing public officials who respect evidence and understand the importance of using scientific and engineering advice in making public policy.

The principal role of the science and technology community is to advance human understanding. But there are times when this is not enough. Scientists and engineers have a right, indeed an obligation, to enter the political debate when the nation’s leaders systematically ignore scientific evidence and analysis, put ideological interests ahead of scientific truths, suppress valid scientific evidence and harass and threaten scientists for speaking honestly about their research.

http://www.sefora.org/

From SEA’s “Scientific Bill of Rights“:

The federal government shall not support any science education program that includes instruction in concepts that are derived from ideology and not science.

(Pictured: Pearl Meister Greengard Prize winner Dr. Philippa Marrack)

From the New York Times:

When the neuroscientist Paul Greengard was named one of three winners of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, he decided to use his award — almost $400,000 — to finance something new: the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize.

This honor, named for Dr. Greengard’s mother, would give an annual $50,000 prize to an outstanding female biomedical researcher. Of the 184 medical Nobelists, only 7 have been women.

“I hoped to bring more attention to the work of brilliant women scientists,” Dr. Greengard recently explained at his laboratory at Rockefeller University in New York. “Perhaps this will bring them further recognition and even a Nobel.”
***
Three years ago, after we announced the first award, my wife and I received several hundred congratulatory messages. Many female scientists wrote and said: “I’ve suffered discrimination. This means so much to me.”
Well, it meant a lot to me, too.

Read the full article here: http://tinyurl.com/o9jyq

Avoid NYT login by using bugmenot.com, or click below to see the full text of the article.

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Via BoingBoing, check out this gorgeous, amazing piece of educational CGI animation. It’s absolutely stunning. (Click the Boing Boing link to see where some BoingBoing readers provide explanations of some of the biochemical processes so artfully depicited in the animation.)

The video was created to help college students better envision the biochemical processes they’re learning about. According to Studio Daily,

The Inner Life of a Cell, an eight-minute animation created in NewTek LightWave 3D and Adobe After Effects for Harvard biology students, won’t draw the kind of box office crowds that more ferocious and furrier digital creations did last Christmas. But it will share a place along side them in SIGGRAPH’s Electronic Theatre show, which will run for three days during the 33rd annual exhibition and conference in Boston next month. Created by XVIVO, a scientific animation company near Hartford, CT, the animation illustrates unseen molecular mechanisms and the ones they trigger, specifically how white blood cells sense and respond to their surroundings and external stimuli.

The video is so much more beautiful and interesting than this description makes it seem.

Via Everyday Scientist:

Powers of Ten

A nine-minute movie about how easy it is to forget that you can go as far in as you can go out.

Everyday Scientist says:

I first saw this movie as a wee first year graduate student while killing some time in the Green library media room. If this doesn’t inspire you to be a scientist, I dont know what will.

Via APOD, a brand-new digital-perspective image of the “Face On Mars.”

Click on the image to see a higher-res version.

Here’s the famous 1976 image:

And here’s the famous Mars smiley face:

Via the PBS website for Einstein’s Big Idea, a very cool educational quiz on the power of the famous equation E=mc^2:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/tiny.html

(And just for fun, Albert’s Blackboard.)

Via the Guardian UK:

A few years ago I was researching a book about Einstein when I stumbled on a footnote about an obscure Frenchwoman of the early 18th century. Her name was Emilie du Châtelet; according to the note, she had played a role in developing the modern concept of energy, and had acquired a certain notoriety in her day.

It left me intrigued. And what I discovered, as I tracked down her letters and books over the next few months, astounded me. That footnote had understated her significance entirely. Emilie du Châtelet had played a crucial role in the development of science. What’s more, she had had a wild life.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianweekly/story/0,,1835656,00.html

To learn more about du Chatelet, rent Einstein’s Big Idea. I just watched it tonight and I think it’s probably the best and most inspiring science doc I’ve ever seen.

You can get it as Disc 3 of Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe.

(Image: Thierry Legault)

On the left is the silhouette of Atlantis. On the right is the ISS.

Via the Bad Astronony Blog. More images from the same astrophotographer are here.

10:39 AM: Here’s an even better version of the image from APOD.

Today’s Science Musing from Chet Raymo:

http://www.sciencemusings.com/blog/2006/09/les-matins-du-monde.html

Some years ago we imagined that the universe might be cyclic — expand, contract, expand, contract, an endless repetition of big bangs tethered by gravity, God’s big bolo bat. For the time being, a cyclic universe does not seem to fit the data. Is the universe then a one-shot affair? Who knows. There’s another possibility. That this universe is just one of many, perhaps an infinite number, bubbling into existence, blazing brightly, then collapsing upon themselves or stretching themselves infinitely thin.

Every people, at every time, have had creation stories. Our story is the first to be affirmed tentatively, the only one held to the refining fire of empirical observation. We take our story seriously, but we don’t stake our lives on it. Unlike every people who lived before us — and most who are alive today — we take our meaning from the search, not from a conclusion. We define ourselves as explorers. We welcome mystery as a challenge. We embrace our ignorance as a vessel waiting to be filled.

Yet again, Chet Raymo’s Science Musings blog offers big thoughts in small packages:

As long as our answers to these questions invoked the gods — as they did for thousands of years — no reliable public knowledge was possible. Only when a few curious people said “I don’t know” did science begin. Admission of ignorance is a prerequisite of scientific discovery, and by the same token, the more we learn, the more we are aware of what we do not know.

The 18th-century English scientist Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, wrote: “The greater is the circle of light, the greater is the boundary of the darkness by which it is confined. But, notwithstanding this, the more light we get, the more thankful we ought to be, for by this means we have the greater range for satisfactory contemplation. In time, the bounds of light will be still further extended; and from the infinity of the divine nature, and the divine works, we may promise ourselves an endless progress in our investigation of them: a prospect truly sublime and glorious.”

http://www.sciencemusings.com/2006/09/through-glass-darkly.html

Damn he’s good.

He’s a hell of a fiction author, too.

Via APOD, a beautiful demonstration of the Earth’s rotation:

(image: Josch Hambsch)

This is an 11-hour exposure composite image of star trails over the skies of Namibia.

The trails make semicircles due to the Earth’s rotation about its axis over the 11 hours (about half a day) of the exposure. If you extended the South Pole out into space (the “celestial pole”), it would be the center of the concentric circles shown. So the center of the star trails pictured is not the “North Star” Polaris, but rather the South celestial pole.

Here’s a similar image from the Northern hemisphere, centered on the North Star.

There is also a “South Star” (sort of), but in part because it never mattered much in navigation or (Western?) culture, it was never called such colloquially.

Poor little South Star.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060915.html