Yikes.

NASA plans on launching 3 Shuttles this year (the first one is scheduled for May), so let’s hope they get this fixed ASAP.

… me!

I’ve been reading The Huffington Post for sometime now. While I don’t always agree with what the bloggers say, I have found much of it to be quite amusing and entertaining.

A couple of months ago I noticed they would link to astronomy news, and it would get a lot of comments, but then that was it. No bloggers were following up. So I decided they needed a scientist on the blogroll to make those needed insider comments.

By coincidence, at The Amaz!ng Meeting, Lawrence O’Donnell was scheduled to talk, and he’s a regular on HuffPo. It figures: he didn’t make it to the meeting. Undaunted, I emailed him (which in itself is cool, since he is the executive produce of The West Wing) and he replied back! I sent him my pitch, he forwarded it to Arianna (now that I’m a blogger we’re on a first-name basis), and she agreed to take me on!

I was then promptly overloaded with work, so I had to wait over a month to actually write something. But the Hubble image in the previous entry seemed like an auspicious way to start my new blogging activities. So I wrote up an entry and away I went! The post went live around 8:00 a.m. Pacific time. I put in a link to my blog here, and out of curiosity I checked my access logs. In the 6 hours since the entry went live, I have accrued exactly 3 hits, and I suspect one of them is from me. So this wasn’t the giant jump I was hoping for.

Still, it’s cool to say I am blogging with one of the biggest and most popular blogs on the internets. I won’t post there terribly often, maybe a few times a month, but when I do I’ll make a note of it here.

One thing that amazes me about astronomy is that even after, what, 30 years of doing it (I was really young when I started) I still get surprised at some basic facts.

That picture above is the spiral galaxy M101, a staple of amateur observing. It’s a big, bright, face-on spiral, and since it’s in Ursa Major (near the Big Dipper) it’s up most of the year. I’ve seen it a few times myself, though usually when I’m looking in books. Actually, in a lot of those books, it’s claimed that our own Galaxy would look like M101 if you could get outside of it.

But boy, is that ever wrong! M101 is a lot bigger than the Milky Way. A lot. It’s 170,000 light years across, compared to 100,000 for us. We have an impressive 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, but M101 is bursting with something like a trillion stars, ten times the number in the Milky Way! That’s staggering. I had no clue M101 was so huge.

The picture above is a stunning new release from Hubble (click it for a higher-res version). It’s almost as awesome as the galaxy itself: the original image is 12,000 x 16,000 pixels in size, making it one of the largest images of a spiral galaxy ever produced. The images span nearly a decade and were originally taken for several different projects (it was nice to see the name of my old friend Kip Kuntz as the head of one of those projects; he assisted me way back when on my very first trip to Baltimore to work on Hubble data for my PhD). It took 54 separate Hubble pointing to span the face of this galaxy.

If you have the stomach (and the broadband) for it, you can download the 455 megabyte full-resolution version, but you’d have to be insane. On my monitor, it would be ten screens in width and 20 in height!

But even the medium res image has delights. For example, the image on the left, sliced out of the piddling 10Mb image (on the tip of the spiral arm on the extreme left in the image), shows one of 3000 star clusters found in M101. Take a look at it: each blue dot is actually a massive giant star, much hotter and bigger than the Sun, and each of which is doomed to explode as a supernova someday. There must be many billions of such stars in M101. Some of them are packed so tightly together in that image they’re just a blur. Imagine what the sky must look like from a planet near there…

And the image on the right is a background galaxy (just above and to the left of the center of M101) that is probably something like 20 or more times farther away than M101’s 25 million light year distance. Spirals are generally blue, but no doubt this one is significantly reddened by dust in M101, like a sunset is reddened by dust suspended in air.

Ironically, that galaxy is probably more like our Milky Way: it has a rectangular bar across the center, just like our Galaxy does. A bar like that is due to complicated gravitational interactions in the centers of galaxies, and for some reason M101 doesn’t have one. That’s interesting all by itself.

I could go on and on. The image is incredibly rich in detail! So find yourself a resolution you’re comfortable with, sit back, and skim across the surface of this magnificent galaxy. With a trillion stars, and billions of solar masses of gas and dust, there’s enough there for everyone to enjoy.

Pardon the shotgun posting here, but I just learned that an anti-evolution bill proposed by Utah state Senator Buttars has been denied.

Woohoo!

It appears the hero (among many) here was Senator Urquhart:

Urquhart opposed Buttars’ bill because he doesn’t feel that science conflicts with religion and said it was misleading to single out one theory as unproven.

A very telling fact about these misguided legislators like Buttars is that they do indeed single out evolution when they tout phrases like "sound science" and "teach the controversy" (of course, when they start screwing with astronomy, I get even more pissed off). These guys, plain and simple, are injecting religion into legislation, and that’s a big no-no.

It’s refreshing to see a legislator like Urquhart actually saying science and religion need not be at odds, though to be honest I wish people would simply call a spade a spade: creationism is wrong, and writing it into laws is a First Amendment violation.

Louis Friedman of the Planetary Society has written an interesting if depressing editorial about NASA’s budget woes. He uses the word "administration" and I’m unclear over whether he means the White House Administration or NASA’s. But his arguments have the ring of truth about them. I hope Mike Griffin reads it; this budget, as it stands, is pitting manned exploration versus unmanned science.

More news is coming out about scientific suppression by the White House.

This San Jose Mercury News article reports that the EPA rejected advice from a scientific panel about pollution standards. This article continues to list the problems in other agencies.

NASA Administrator Mike Griffin was on NASA TV just today talking about various subjects, and was asked point-blank about all this, including the George Deutsch nonsense. He said (paraphrased only slightly as I was writing it down as quickly as I could):

Clearly, there was a situation… where at least one misguided individual was trying to insert his religious belief [into a scientific process].

He made a plea (literally) for people to report it when they think something like this is happening. However, he made what sounded to me like a thinly veiled allusion to climatologist Jim Hansen (who was being suppressed by Deutsch), saying “Not every piece of science is newsworthy,” meaning that maybe what Hansen was trying to say wasn’t really news. If this is what Dr. Griffin mean, I disagree with him: Hansen’s reports were in fact news; his editorial in the UK Independent made that clear.

Griffin also made various statements saying that Deutsch was a lone gunman, and that NASA has no policy of suppression. He admitted that NASA policy on public affairs and the dissemination of science news needs revision, and that a committee is even now discussing what should be done.

That’s welcome news. I hope it pans out.

Every month, I do a segment called "Brains on Vacation" on the SETI Institute’s radio show "Are We Alone". The radio program itself deals with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in general, though once a month they have what they call "Skeptical Sunday" dealing with issues of critical thinking. BoV deals with people just doing silly stuff; we’ve covered star naming, the Virgin Mary underpass, and other slices of silliness.

The show has been airing on independent radio stations across the country, but we have a big announcement: we’re going satellite! We premiere our first show on Discovery Channel radio broadcast on Sirius satellite radio channel 119, on Wednesday, March 1. The episode of AWA is a Skeptical Sunday one called "Psychic Sleuth" and includes a BoV piece about buying star names.

And we’re actually going to be aired three times a week. The premiere of each show is 9:00 a.m. EST Wednesday, with a repeat at 9:00 p.m. EST Wednesday and another repeat at 11:00 p.m. EST Sundays.

The shows will be archived on the AWA site, and will be podcast as well. This will be done on Thursdays, after Discovery has had their first two airings.

So tune in! You may not find out if we are truly alone or not, but with this much larger satellite venue for the show, we’ll know our listeners aren’t alone.