Journey to the Center of the Galaxy

November 10, 2009

Because of increasing light pollution, the most spectacular structure in the sky is seen by fewer and fewer people these days – the Milky Way. During the summer months you are in fact peering in the direction of the downtown hub of our pinwheel galaxy.  The central region straddles the constellations Scorpius and Sagittarius that are low on the southern horizon when viewed from northern latitudes.

But even on the most pitch-black night you still can’t see much of the real core because foreground spiral lanes of stars and black dust obscure it. In visible light , we really see a just few percent of all the stars in the galaxy. It is definitely a backyard-only view.

Alien Abductions: Idiocy of the Worst Kind

November 06, 2009

Today the much-hyped film, “The Fourth Kind,” debuts in theaters with a predictable poster of a pair of other-worldly eyes staring out.

Sci-fi film buffs will remember Steven Spielberg’s sappy 1977 film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” where flying saucers outfitted with disco lights buzz lone cars and farmhouses, and in a messianic ending aliens carry a few chosen people skyward in a “mothership” that looks more like a chandelier.

“The Fourth Kind” goes one step further and supposedly presents “real footage” clips from alleged alien abduction cases – the so-called “fourth kind” of encounter with extraterrestrials. 

Color-Challenged Astronomers Are Lost in a Latte' Universe

November 04, 2009

God was sitting up late one night designing the universe. He took care of simple things first. Gravity would construct stars, galaxies and planets. Biological evolution would ensure a robust diversity of life forms.

But what color to make the universe?  God looked down into his foamy cup of latte' and decided that the color beige would be just perfect. In reality God hadn't invented the other colors yet so He didn't have much of a choice at the time.

Last Monday the Astronomy Picture of the Day displayed nothing but a plain eggshell white panel. The caption declared that is how the entire sky would look if the light from all the stars and galaxies were smeared out into a homogeneous glow.

The Night The Martians Took Broadway!

October 30, 2009

The Balloon Boy saga from a couple weeks ago will go down in mass media history as one of the great hoaxes. Network news was riveted on following the wayward balloon for over two hours because they were convinced there was a stowaway child onboard. Maybe we were primed for this sort of hoax (more later).

But 71 years ago today the mother of all media hoaxes took place. On the night before Halloween in 1938 CBS Radio presented an hour-long adaptation of H. G. Wells' classic science fiction story “The War of the Worlds.”

New Rocket Ready To Go Nowhere

October 23, 2009

Like someone who just bought a new car, earlier this week NASA proudly rolled out its next generation spaceship, the Ares I-X. The spindly rocket looks anemic compared to its predecessors: the space shuttle, Saturn V, and Saturn IB.  But at a height of 310 feet it casts a long pencil-like shadow over the Kennedy Space Center causeway.

Ironically, the Augustine Commission report that formally came out this week casts a black eclipse shadow over this arrow-craft that is scheduled for its maiden test flight in just a few days. 

The commission will give a series of options to the White House for President Obama to consider for redirecting NASA’s future human space effort.

Flying Saucer Scam Busts Pseudoscience

October 20, 2009

The human melodrama aside, last week’s “Balloon Boy” debacle was also an inevitable demonstration of pseudoscience run amok.  

I don’t want to give the purported hoax of the runaway flying saucer balloon any more attention that it has already sucked up in world news. But I do want to point out that beyond the reckless hubris of its accused perpetrator, Richard Heene, the event is an indictment of our sensationalist and fuzzy-brained TV culture. 

Let’s start with the bubble-headed TV “reality shows,” like the wife-swapping program Mr. Heene appeared on, that cultivate and empower publicity mongers. The screwier you think and act, the better.  Add to that the popularity of nutty-professor (sans PhD) pseudoscience shows that cash in on the big public appetite for junk food for the mind.

Forgotten Planet

October 18, 2009

There’s another dwarf planet to add to the list of solar system bodies that  share minor league status with Pluto.

Newly published Hubble Space Telescope pictures show that the large asteroid Pallas is nearly spherical. In other words the body has enough gravity to pull itself into ball where all surface features are essentially the same distance from the core.

This is one criterion for a planet according to the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Hubble’s sharp view can resolve the disk of Pallas and shows that it is slightly egg-shaped, and roughly the width of West Virginia.

When We’ll Really Nuke The Moon

October 14, 2009

The dust is still settling from the public blowup over NASA’s LCROSS experiment to go prospecting for water on the moon by crashing a rocket booster into it last Friday. The impact was a PR flub. There were no dramatic images for any evidence of the smashup.

Nevertheless, I have subsequently received a few angry e-mails from people who are incensed that we would harm Earth’s only natural satellite.

The tersest note was from a retired Marine:

“Stop bombing the fu*king moon.”

In a following e-mail he was more philosophical: 

“Yes, worlds are being destroyed every second in our timeless universe, but through natural processes of creation and recreation . . .”  

If I apply that logic, then we should do nothing in the future to deflect or destroy any Earth-bound asteroid, but instead let nature take its, er, natural course  in “recreating” life on the surface of an incinerated Earth.

Moon Survives Unprovoked Attack!

October 09, 2009

Internet traffic on blogs, YouTube, and discussion boards was nearly predicting the end of the world today.

It didn’t happen.

People warned that a missile launched by evil government scientists was going to plow into the virgin Moon and explode. The effects on Earth from disrupting the celestial harmony would be unpredictable but devastating: tsunamis, meteorite showers, volcanoes – and even more global warming.

What happened instead? Early morning news anchors were speechless at the NASA live TV feed. That’s because absolutely nothing was seen happening at the ground zero moment.

Super Ring Dwarfs Saturnian System

October 07, 2009

Though NASA’s Cassini orbiter has been surveying Saturn and its moons in stunning detail for the past five years, it missed -- not surprisingly -- the 800-pound gorilla in the Saturnian system. 

Infrared astronomers announced yesterday the discovery of a huge puffy and tenuous ring of ice and dust encircling Saturn well beyond the orbits of most of its satellites.

The ghostly ring is way too faint to be seen with optical telescopes. It took the infrared eyes of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to pick up the telltale glow of warm dust in the ring. The ring sets a new record as the largest structure seen around any planet.