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.

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.

Apollo 11 Site in Higher Defintion

October 05, 2009

What a difference the time of day makes on the moon. 

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has re-photographed the Apollo 11 landing site on the Sea of Tranquility. The first picture released on July 17 showed the long shadow of the lander because the sun was low in the sky. It was essentially late afternoon on the moon.

In the new picture the afternoon sun is 28 degrees above the horizon and the site looks noticeably different with better contrast and brightness. 

In particular, you can see the trail of footprints of the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, as he walked to the 100-foot wide Little West crater for a close-up look.

My God It's Full Of Stars!

September 09, 2009

Ebullient NASA scientists today released a stunning portfolio of full color images  of the universe taken with the newly upgraded and refurbished Hubble Space Telescope. 

The new Hubble camera, called Wide Field Camera 3, is  “panchromatic.” This is an old term from the days of photographic film  that  describes a black-and-white emulsion with a sensitivity to all colors of light. The WFC3 goes even further with sensitivity stretching from ultraviolet to near-infrared wavelengths. Call it Super-Technicolor!

Like B&W film used in the Technicolor motion picture process, a Hubble exposure starts out as monochrome. Next, separate pictures are taken though different color filters and assembled into a full color image.

My favorite early-release WFC3 photo is shown here. It is a view looking deep into the heart  of the globular star cluster Omega Centauri. 

Bootprints On The Moon

September 07, 2009

Last month a reader left a comment on this site wondering where the “Apollo artifacts” were that I said NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) would photograph.

Well this is the coolest picture to date from LRO that captures the activities of Apollo astronauts at a moon-landing site. It is littered with hardware! 

But even more intriguing, we see the astronauts' footprints. From LRO's altitude they look like the humble little tracks of small birds across newly fallen snow. 

LRO flew over the flat lava plain in western Oceanus Procellarum where Apollo 12 landed on November 14, 1969. The unmanned Surveyor 3 landed there two years earlier.

The Real Visitors From Space

August 19, 2009

There was a lot of hubbub in the news this week about the British Ministry of Defense releasing declassified UFO reports from 1981 to 1996. Not coincidentally, sightings in Great Britain appeared to increase sixfold with the release of the 1996 space invasion movie Independence Day. But I’m not going to waste  bandwidth to give any further attention to this collection of  space-age fractured fairy tales.

Instead, last month a real interplanetary face-to-face encounter took place between two chunks of metal. One is the Mars rover Opportunity; the other is a 1,800-pound piece of iron. Both fell out of the sky onto Mars. The rover, back in 2004, the meteorite, 3 billion years ago.

The Dragon’s Breath Star

August 01, 2009

The bright red star Betelgeuse in the winter constellation Orion the Hunter is sure to get a giggle in introductory astronomy college classes. Older students may remember the 1988 Tim Burton film Beetle Juice with comic Michael Keaton. And, it’s fun to tell younger students that Betelgeuse is Arabic for “armpit of the giant” (which is actually a mistranslation).

The latest data from the Very Large Telescope in Chile telescope show that this star is nothing to laugh at. It is one bad-ass supergiant, with a dragon’s breath plume of gas, and boiling monster bubbles of gas – yuck!

Placed inside our solar system it would swallow Earth and the other inner planets and extend all the way out to Jupiter’s orbit. The volume of space such a monster star engulfs is simply inconceivable. Imagine the sci-fi film: The Star That Ate My Planet!