I remember when I first looked through a telescope. I was four or five years old, and my dad bought a real el-cheapo department store ’scope (A Tasco 40 mm for those keeping score at home). He set it up in the driveway, and pointed it at a star in the sky. When I looked through it, I saw it wasn’t a star, it was Saturn.

I still remember the amazement I felt (though the memory has dimmed with time, so I wonder now if the memory has been gilded with the emotions I have felt during the many times I have seen Saturn since). For a first-timer, nothing beats Saturn through a telescope. Nothing. It is a perfect jewel, a wonder floating in a sea of black. The rings are so obvious, and so geometrically wonderful. Whenever I show someone Saturn for the first time, they universally gasp in awe, and the most common thing I hear is “It looks just like it does in pictures!”

Saturn is a very cool place.

And the Cassini space probe just keeps hammering this point home, time and again. The images we’re getting from that machine are truly awe-inspiring. But there are so many! It’s returning thousands of images, far too many for the scientists to look at in real time.

Enter the internet. NASA did a smart thing: they put up a web page where they store every single raw image from Cassini. Anyone with access to the internet can browse these images, or download them and process them– the raw images are not in color, but with a little knowledge and practice, they can be combined to make color images.

That’s just what Spanish amateur astronomer Fernando Garcia Navarro did. He found some astonishing images of Saturn from Cassini, and combined them to form this jaw-dropper of an image:

Click the image to go to a higher-res image, or here for a super-high-res image.

For sheer beauty and awe-inspiring goodness, this is hard to beat. But wait! Where are the rings?

Look closely, and you’ll see them– they are edge-on, so they’re almost invisible (they’re the original “thin blue line”!). When Cassini crosses the plane of the rings, it sees them edge-on, and they nearly disappear. Saturn’s rings extend well over a half-million kilometers from the planet, making them comfortably bigger than the Moon’s orbit around the Earth… yet in most places they are less than a single kilometer thick! To give you an idea of just how thin this is, take a piece of paper and draw a circle on it 20 centimeters across (about 8 inches). If that circle represents Saturn’s rings, then to scale, that paper is 1000 times thicker than Saturn’s rings!

Amazing. Yet they still cast that magnificent shadow across the planet. And if that weren’t enough, two of Saturn’s moons can be seen in the image as well. And one other thing– most people spend so much time looking at the rings, that they never look at Saturn itself. In this image, you can see that Saturn is clearly non-spherical. It’s flattened, wider at the equator than at the poles, because it spins so rapidly (its day is only about 10 hours long) and also because it is very low density. These combine to make the planet 10% wider at the equator than at the poles!

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again– Saturn is a very cool place.

What with all the sightings of Mary and Jesus — and my debunking of them — I thought my Bad Readers would be amused to see this image which I spotted in the latest issue of the magazine Physics Today:

The pattern arises from the way light interacts with atoms in a crystal, and it’s called a Brillouin pattern. I’m showing the image to you here because of the specific pattern in it. You want a conspiracy, a miracle? I’ll ask you: Where is cutting-edge work being done on Brillouin patterns? Why, The Technion, an institute in Israel!

I’ll see your Underpass Mary, and raise you an Abe Vigoda (who is Jewish, by the way)!

P.S. The title of this entry comes from the word pareidolia.

As a lot of people reading this may know, probably my biggest claim to fame is, bizarrely, debunking people who think the Moon landings were faked. I use weapons most of these people are totally unprepared for, like logic, reason, evidence, truth, etc.

Not everyone takes the time to do it the way I do. Some people, arguably more famous, and more involved with Apollo, tend to take a shorter route. Like, say, Buzz Aldrin. Remember him? Second guy to walk on the Moon, did a voice on the Simpsons? Yeah, him.

So in September 2003, a Moon Hoax proponent of debatable character named Bart Sibrel jumped out at Buzz and asked him to swear on a bible that he (Buzz) walked on the Moon. Buzz refused. So, logically, Bart got in his face, calling him "a coward, a liar, and a thief".

Buzz used to dogfight MiGs in Korea. He also strapped his butt to a tin can and rode it to the Moon (and back). Calling someone like that a coward may not net you the best reward. In this case, it really didn’t. Buzz clocked Bart with a jab to the jaw.

As if that didn’t humiliate Sibrel enough (who is, after all, his own worst enemy), this moment has once again been immortalized, but this time as a cartoon.

The cartoon was drawn by Thrdgll. There are lots of other cartoons there too, many of which are really, really funny. But the first panel of that Buzz Aldrin strip made my day.

Poor Bart. But then, when you devote your life to spewing the kind of unadulterated crap that he does, perhaps a little bit of karma doesn’t hurt. Us, I mean. It hurt him, I’ll bet.

My thanks to Bad Astronomy Bulletin Board poster “Smackdown”, who alerted me to this.

Note added May 26, 2005: I submitted the following entry to the Skeptics’ Circle carnival of critical thinking, and good ol’ St. Nate accepted it for the Ninth Skeptics’ Circle, even though I was a couple of hours late on the deadline. Thanks Nate!

Note added June 1, 2005: and if that’s not enough, it’s also part of The Tangled Bank, a collection of science blogs. As usual, there are some really stellar entries there, so go take a look!

I was just over at RedStateRabble, and he mentions a creationist, calling him a “pseudoscientist”. I used to use this term, but I’ve stopped. I have a new one, but first I want to say why I switched.

I read a book talking about “framing”, the idea that phrasing things in a certain way can engender a desired response. It’s more than just using a name for something, it’s sculpting the name in such a way as to bring about an almost reflexive response in your listener.

An example: not to be contentious, but take abortion. People who are for it are “pro-choice”. People who are against it are “pro-life”. Where is the word “abortion”? Nowhere. Are people who are not “pro-life” then “anti-life”? Not necessarily, but the words certainly imply it. Are people who are not “pro-choice” then “anti-choice”? Again, not necessarily, but it sure sounds like it.

Framing.

I put up a web page last year about debating pseudoscientists. Incidentally, I still stick to what I said there. In it, I use the word “pseudoscientist” many times. A pseudoscientist is someone who is not a scientist and does not practice the scientific method, but who does make extraordinary claims on little or no evidence, and discusses these claims using a veneer of scientific-sounding language.

At least, that’s what skeptics think when they use the word. But I suspect that to the public, this sounds more like “someone-who-is-sorta-like-a-scientist”. To them, “pseudo” might mean “quasi”, and not “false”, as it should.

This framing of the situation isn’t aggressive enough, and may be misunderstood. We need a word that shows, correctly, that these pseudoscience jokers are not only not scientists, but are actively eroding away at science, trying to promote ideas that chip away at peoples’ ability to think critically. Creationists, Moon Hoax proponents, the Planet X crowd… you can think of a few on your own, I have no doubt.

So I came up with the word “antiscientists”. That’s a frame I think gets the point across. These twinkies aren’t sortof scientists, or even bad scientists. Science uses evidence, is testable, and if it fails the test, the idea is modified or dropped. When an antiscientist talks about their idea, they fabricate evidence, or wildly distort real evidence, or wildly misinterpret real evidence. When confronted with truth, they ignore it, or claim it to be false, or cast aspersions on the person who said it and then ignore it. That is not, that is precisely what science does not do, and is the antithesis of science.

They’re antiscientists, and what they do is antiscience.

That’s the term I’ve started using for these people. I like it. I long ago decided to walk the path of skepticism, but there are a lot of ways to walk it. Some are confrontational, some are argumentative, some are quiet, some are polite. I prefer to be polite. I enforce that rule on my discussion forum, and I practice it when I give lectures in public. It’s not for everyone, but it is for me.

I’ll note that it’s rare for me to use words that are aggressive when dealing with crank science. I usually use silly words, calling my opponents “twinkies” or “goofs”, instead of what someone like, say, Penn Jilette might call them (and in many if not most cases, he’s right on the money with his call).

So I like the word “antiscience”. I like the way it feels when I say it. It’s barbed, and to-the-point. I want it to sting a bit, but I don’t want it to be just name-calling like the examples above.

And to a skeptic like me, it has the ring of truth to it. Have no doubt: what these people are doing is, in fact, antiscience. And I call ‘em like I see ‘em.

I have to. I’m a pro scientist.

There’s nothing mind-blowing today on the BABlog. I just wanted to say something.

I finally bought myself a tripod for the monster 15×70 binoculars I’ve had for a year, because the binocs are a little bit too big to hold steady with just my hand. We put up a bird feeder in the back yard the other day, and the finches have discovered it. Finches are jittery and fly away if they spot you, so being able to stand inside my house and watch them through the binocs is nice. The goldfinches were so yellow it made my brain hurt.

When the Sun set, I looked up the position of Venus using software, and saw that it was only 15 degrees above the horizon– not much more than the span out your hand when held out at arm’s length. So I took the rig outside to my back porch (finches be damned) to take a look at our planetary fraternal twin.

Even though the sky was still bright, Venus was a snap to find. I just locked the tripod in the up-and-down direction, then scanned back-and-forth. Bang! There she was.

I love seeing Venus (and Jupiter too) when the Sun has just set and the sky is still blue. At the moment I saw it, not even three hours ago as I write this, Venus was about 245 million kilometers away (150 million miles). Imagine! The light from Venus traveled all the way to the Sun, then past it another 150 million kilometers, through the binoculars and finally into my eyes, revealing Venus as a brilliant white disk.

Once I knew where to look, I could spot Venus– barely!– with my unaided eye, too. The Little Astronomer took a peek, and saw it too. Then I showed her how to spot it with just her eye (start at the ventilation pipe in our roof, then go up the width of two fingers held at arm’s length… “I see it!”).

Venus will be in our evening sky, making it pretty easy to see, for the rest of 2005. By the end of the year, it’ll start to move toward the Sun quickly, becoming a thin crescent, and getting incredibly bright (expect more UFO reports, folks).

It’ll be nice to see it that way. I sometimes forget to go outside and just look up, and hey– that’s what astronomy is all about.

Note added May 30, 2005: This entry was chosen to be part of the Carnival of the Godless, a blog carnival that is not so much about atheism as it is about seeing the world from a godless perspective (i.e., not using a supernatural being to explain things). There are many fascinating blog entries listed there.

Some time ago, I decided to become prostrate to the gods of advertising, in order to justify to my wife the vast amounts of money I was throwing away on my website. I got Google Ads, which are supposed to be targeted ads based on the content of the page on which they are served. So if you have a page about, oh say left-handed pipe cleaners, then Google will serve ads on your page about pipes, left-handed can openers, and (it wouldn’t surprise me) a homeopathic lip cancer “remedy”.

I deal with a lot of silly anti-science hoaxery, and so, ironically, I get a lot of ads that actually go against my own fight. My page about the Apollo Moon hoax, for example, might have an ad for a book promoting the hoax, or a video about UFOs. I can filter such nonsense ads, but I have actually run out of allowed filters at Google. I figure what the heck, if someone reads my page, they are (hopefully) unlikely to buy any kind of garbage advertised by these wacky places. And since the advertiser pays anyway, it’s win-win for the good guys. ^*

Still, the irony gets to me sometimes. Google served up an ad on one of my pages recently for a company selling pictures of the Cone Nebula as seen by Hubble. Drink in its beauty for a moment…

… and now indulge me as I regale you with what you are seeing.

The Cone Nebula is just one part of a vast collection of gas and dust. It’s length is about 7 light years — 70 trillion kilometers. It is 2500 light years away, which means that, if you were to look through a telescope at the Cone, the fleet of photons hitting your retina would have left the nebula when Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Babylon, and when the good people of Athens decided to experiment with democracy as a form of government.

Near the Cone (off the top of this image) is a very young, very massive star. This star blows an ethereal but violent wind of gas off its surface, a super-solar wind, if you will. Countless millions of tons of gas moving at hundreds of thousands of kilometers per hour slam into the Cone, sculpting it into the shape we see. Inside the Cone is a secret– a nest of young stars, newly born, struggling to cast off the cocoon of gas and dust in which they are shrouded. Some of these stars will explode in tormented deaths in a relatively short time, while others will still be steadily shining well after our own Sun has faded and gone.

When you look at this picture, you are seeing the interplay of forces both subtle and gross, matter and energy interacting on a scale too grand for humans to comprehend, and spanning a timescale that dwarfs even the long, long history of humans as we currently know ourselves.

But for some people, that isn’t enough. It’s hard to imagine– who wouldn’t be satisfied with such glorious knowledge?

Why, the folks who bought an ad that Google placed on my website. Those people think they see the face of Jesus in it.

Yes, really.

I could go on and on about this topic of seeing faces in semi-random patterns, especially religious ones, even sometimes
seeing Jesus in astronomical objects.

But I won’t, at least not too much. I will show you something that galled me: just in case you don’t see a face (and instead, if you have decent eyesight, and think it looks more like an infected fingertip or, uh, something a lot worse), the folks behind that advertisement want to help you along, so they Photoshopped a cheesy drawing into the nebula. Keep your eyes– if you can– on the animated image below from their website.

Feh. At least sometimes the objects in which people see religious icons at least have some vague resemblance to the icons, but this? Let me repeat myself: feh.

How many times have I heard that religion is about beauty, art, and something more than ourselves, and how many times, from those same people, have I heard that science is about cold equations, heartless numbers, and the emotionless accumulation of facts?

Don’t anyone dare tell me about the emptiness of rational thought, the prosaic nature of science. It’s science that revealed the beauty of the Cone Nebula, and science that opened our minds to the beauty of understanding it.

And long after every human currently on this planet has shuffled off their mortal coil, and a thousand thousand religions have come and gone, the Cone will still be thoughtlessly, coldly, and unemotionally creating stars for millennia to come.

* I wonder what type of ads will be displayed for this blog entry. Religious stuff? More astronomy images? Left handed pipe cleaners? Keep track in the comments! Collect ‘em all!

What can I say?

Oh: I reviewed the new Star Wars movie. I can say that.

Synopsis: it was pretty good, the acting stunk, the special effects rocked, and of course it had Bad Astronomy (well, science at least) in it.

Science