Too bad I can’t attend this conference on astronomy and creationism. I’d love to go and see what these guys have to say (although I can guess, since I’ve read several antiscience essays and a book by creationist Hugh Ross, one of the speakers and whose organization, Reasons to Believe, is sponsoring the event).

Why can’t I go? Because just a few days later I’ll be in St. Louis, at the American Association of the Advancement of Science annual meeting, where I’ll be on a panel of scientists talking about the current creationist attack on science.

Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.

Did you ever hear about the "Nun Bun", the cinnamon bun that many people thought had an uncanny likeness of Mother Teresa layered in its nooks and crannies? Well, it was stolen from the coffeehouse where it was on display.

As the article says,

When Bob Bernstein arrived at his coffeehouse to assess the scene of an early Christmas morning break-in, the one thing he noticed missing was the cinnamon bun that bears a striking likeness to Mother Teresa.

The person who stole it didn’t take the money from the donation jar that was right next to the bun on the counter. Obviously, this was no petty theft. Was it heresy?

No, but some would consider it a mortal cinnamon.

I dunno about this. It does look like a face, but Mother Teresa? It looks more like something from a Wallace and Gromit movie. And hey, I’m an expert: I’ve seen better, and that effort was literally cheesy.

And if you get the feeling that I am not taking this seriously, then I have three letters for you:

D.

U.

H.

Lastly, I’ll note that the coffeehouse owner — who kept the a bun because it looks like a catholic Saint-in-training — is named Bernstein. And yes, he is Jewish.

MMMMmmmmm, sacrilicious.

So, for the eight of you who will actually read this blog a) over the weekend, b) over the holiday (yes, holiday) weekend, and c) in the United States and Canada, you may get a special treat.

On Christmas morning, the Moon will occult (pass in front of) the bright star Spica. Star occultations are pretty neat. You can watch the Moon get closer to the star, and closer, and then blip! The star is gone.

What you see and when you see it depends on where you live. For me, in northern California, I miss the whole thing (if it doesn’t rain — and it will — I will see the Moon pass very close to Spica, but it’ll be a clean miss). Check the link above to see where you stand. There are diagrams there (like the one I stole reproduced above) that’ll help.

Oh– you won’t need a telescope or binoculars or anything. Just your eyes, and, most likely, a warm coat. And coffee! It’ll happen early in the morning for most folks.

I think (hope) that Sky and Telescope will forgive me for using the image. I write for them.

On November 7 of this year, a small meteoroid hit the Moon.

Two astronomers have set up a small telescope with a CCD video camera to see if they could capture the faint flash from a lunar impact. And they nailed one on their first night! It’s almost certainly an impact; they investigated other possible causes (a satellite flash, a meteor in the Earth’s atmosphere, a cosmic ray zapping their equipment) and were able to rule them out. It looks real to me.

There have been other meteoroid impacts seen in the past. In fact, there has been a rich history of flashes on the Moon, collectively called "Lunar Transient Phenomena". Some areas seem prone to them; the crater Aristarchus once had a red flash in it which some people thought might have been volcanic! But it was never confirmed.

Years ago, that got me thinking. I got interested in setting up a project to observe these flashes. If they are meteoroids, then you need to look at the dark part of the Moon. Your best bet would be a small ’scope that could see the entire Moon at once, and a video camera that takes thousands of individual frames. It would have to automatically process them; take an image, take a second image, subtract them, and look for a place where the brightness has suddenly changed. You’d need a robotic telescope, but it wouldn’t even have to be a dark site, since the flashes are fairly bright…

In the end, it was a pretty big undertaking for one guy. I told a few folks about it and they agreed it would be interesting, but a pain to set up. Also, getting a grant to do it would be a big time sink, and I was busy at the time (I was just starting to write my book). So I never pursued it.

Figures.

Actually, this would be a relatively easy thing for an amateur to do now. A six-inch telescope would probably be enough, in fact. The flash seen in November was at 7th magnitude, which is not hard to spot with binoculars, so even a small ’scope would do it. And, in fact, having more people doing this is important, vital even– it can help distinguish real lunar impacts from something local (like a satellite or airplane). If two different telescopes at widely different locations spot it, that makes the case pretty solid for an impact.

Any takers?

Tip of the BABlog hat to Larry Kellogg’s Lunar Update Mailing List for this tidbit.

Well, nuts. I read the press release, did some follow-up, and still managed to make a mistake in this morning’s post!

The outer ring is probably caused by Mab. But instead of being formed in a collision, it appears to be more likely that the ring is due to continuous bombardment of meteoroids on Mab, which dislodge material and forms the ring. Some of that material is swept back up, but the two processes balance. It’s like a sink which has the drain open but water coming in from the spigot; the water level stays the same, even though there is water flowing in and out of the sink.

Where an old collision plays a role is in the inner ring, discovered recently as well. That one has no obvious supply of dust, but the ring doesn’t look like it can last long (maybe a million years). So that is where there must by smaller moonlets, maybe a mile or so across, which are the source of dust through collisions.

My mistake in the earlier post was to conflate these two things. I apologize. I hope this doesn’t confuse people too much.

If you want more info, try the SETI page which has more details.

Sometimes, surprises await in your own back yard.

I’m not surprised new rings of Uranus were found when Hubble took another look at the gas giant. After all, it’s 3 billion kilometers away, and the rings are thin and faint. And actually, geometry is favoring them getting easier to see: as Uranus orbits the Sun, the rings get closer to being seen edge-on by us. Since they are so thin, this makes them easier to see, like how a transparent pane of glass gets easier to see as you tilt it.

No, what’s surprising about this new set of observations had to do with the moons seen along with these rings. What’s very interesting is that a moon discovered two years ago, called Mab, shares the same orbit as these rings. Now, you might think that a moon sitting in the middle of a ring would sweep up the dust in the ring, destroying it. But really, the fact that we see a ring at all means it must be coming from that moon, or related to it somehow.

But how? Well, enter surprise #2. These images have allowed scientists to track the orbits of these moons. They determined that the moons’ orbits are chaotic. That means that as the moons pass by each other in their orbits, they affect each other a lot, and it’s very difficult to predict how that will change their orbits in the future (we would need infinitely precise observations to make those predictions, which is of course impossible).

It also means that over millions of years, collisions are likely. The moons must smack into each other. What a sight that would be! The energy released would be awesome to behold!

And this might be the answer to the mystery of the moon in the ring: the moon might be the source of the faint ring, or, more accurately, both are related to the same event.

Imagine, a million years or so ago, as Mab (larger than it is now) orbits Uranus. Looming ahead is another moon… and they are aimed right at each other. They get closer, approaching at thousands of kilometers per hour. Then… kaBLAM! The collision would be more energetic than all the nuclear weapons on Earth combined. The catastrophe easily shatters the moons, creating millions of smaller moons a few meters to kilometers across. Too small for us to see, they would still be there orbiting Uranus today. What we now call Mab is simply the largest of those remaining chunks. The pulverized particles become the ring, and further collisions among the moonlets replenishes it.

When I was a kid, I thought Uranus wasn’t very interesting. I knew it was "lying on its side", but other than that very little was known by anyone. Ho hum! But I was wrong . There’s a lot going on out there.

All of this, I found, was the result of very short exposures of Uranus taken by Hubble. I’d love to see longer exposures taken (or in reality, more short exposures that can be added together) to see the rings and moons in more clarity. What other surprises await us in the solar system’s back yard?

I was poking around the web a little while ago looking for an image of a supernova remnant, an exploded star. I found this one from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory:

Pretty neat, huh? This is the expanding gas from a star that blew up in the year 1006, and this is what it looks like after 1000 years. The gas is still way hot, millions of degrees, so it emits X-rays. Chandra detects these high-energy photons, and can construct an image out of them.

So when I found this image, I thought it was cool. But I just knew it looked familiar somehow. Suddenly, I had it! I knew where I’d seen it before! I saw it when I was a kid, in my brother’s comic books.

What can I say? It’s clobberin’ time!

What were you expecting? Michael Chiklis?

Tip of the Bad Beret to Space News Blog for reminding me of this.