OK, the Mars pictures are very very cool. But did you know that we have satellites orbiting a closer planet?

Yeah, duh. Earth!

The Landsat satellites have been around a long time (34 years) taking important data about our home planet.

And now you can watch! The USGS has created the EarthNow! Landsat Image viewer, which displays a scrolling continuous image of the Earth as seen from Landsat 5 and 7. I’ve tuned in a few times and have yet to see a live image, but it does say when the next pass of the satellite will be.

There is something vaguely hypnotic with watching the Earth roll by underneath you. At 250 meters per pixel you won’t see too many man-made features (at least not individual ones) but just the terrain itself is relaxing. As I write this, coincidentally, the image passed right over my house! I couldn’t even make out the city of Santa Rosa, which is a decent sized place. I could see Point Reyes and the Farallon islands though. Pretty cool.

All in all, the Mars images are cooler. The higher resolution makes them prettier, and, after all, they’re from another planet! But Earth still ranks high on the list of places I like to live and look at.

Sure, it’s snarky and resorts to ad hominems, but Sylvia Brown is a bad, bad person, so Rebecca’s narrative of a trip to see this scammer is a great read. It has some NSFW language, however. I think Rebecca is in many ways NSFW.

And she still has calendars, too.

Update: As Emily points out in the comments below, these are not the latest images, and will not be updated. Go to the HiROC site for more images. I will also note that their big images are in JPG 2000 format, and they recommend using ExpressView. I installed it and it’s messing up my PC! So install with caution.

With the news from Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) looking bleaker every day, you might want to take a look at some fantastic news from MRO: the folks who work on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera have created an online image viewer.

And lemme just say, Holy Haleakale!

This. Site. ROCKS.

The camera’s full name is the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, and they ain’t kidding. The resolution is simply incredible. Each image pixel represents 55 centimeters (20 inches) on the martian surface! Half a meter!

Take a look at this one; it’s Cerberus Fossae (image TRA_000827_1875), a trough on Mars:

That’s the whole HiRISE image, but at drastically reduced scale: the original image I downloaded at full res was 30 megabytes (!) and was 11852 x 9444 pixels (!!). It took several minutes to download. The image I’m displaying here has been reduced in dimension by a factor of about 25 in each direction (that’s over 600 in area), and further compressed as a JPG.

So if that’s the low-res version, what’s the high-res look like? Well, here is a tiny subsection:

The original picture is so frakking big I lost track of where I got this subsection. Somewhere like a third of the way in from the left. This image is also JPG compressed; click it for the uncompressed version. You can see rocks and wind ripples in the dust (I love that part). It’s still hard to get the scale of this, so here is yet another subsection with just some of the rocks in it, blown up so you can see the pixels:

Remember, those pixels are half a meter across. The rocks in the image aren’t much bigger than what you can see in some gardens. I see glacier-dropped granite blocks far bigger than that all over northern California! The ripples in the image are spaced a meter or two apart, like what you might see at the beach.

WOW.

These pictures are beyond superb. They are high art. And it gets better! On the HiRISE site, you can pan and zoom in on the images. This is really slick, and fun to do. It’s like Google maps, for Mars! They have lots of different terrain (hmmm, we may need a different word for that) like craters, troughs, plains, and some very nifty layering near the north pole.

And maybe even coolest (which is saying a lot) they have a full map of the planet at the bottom which you can pan and zoom, and the positions of the HiRISE images are labeled.

Fan - freaking - tastic. Coolest thing I’ve seen in ages.

And it just gets better; they’ll add more images as they come in. They’ll only be mapping 2% of the surface of Mars, but that’s going to add up to a vast amount of data. When the high-res data came back from MGS, the scientists literally could not keep up with the data flow. A lot of amateur Marsophiles found interesting and scientifically valuable phenomena in the images. The same thing will happen here, guaranteed. So start looking!

Calling all astrophotographers!

In October, a star in Cassiopeia brightened suddenly. It brightened from magnitude 11.5 to 7.5, a factor of about 40. The star was not the type known to do this, so astronomers are puzzling over it. It might have been a microlensing event, where the gravity of an object between us and the star acts like a lens, amplifying the star’s light. This would be an extremely rare and fantastically cool event, so if you have any images of the constellation taken in October, please see that link above. You can also contact the American Association of Variable Star Observers.

I went online to the Digitized Sky Survey and created this image of the star in question, GSC 3656-1328 (field of view = 0.5 degrees, coordinates = 00 09 22, +54 39 44 (2000)):

Almost any wide field picture of the constellation may be helpful (the star is in the western part). If you have one, post a comment below. If you have one online, post a link! Also, you can post images to the Bad Astronomy and Universe Today bulletin board. That’s a great place to see other images and talk about them. You should check it out if you have Cassiopeia pix or not!

Tip o’ the dew shield to DaveP’s Astronomy.

The new episode of the great podcast Skepticality is up. It features James Randi talking about the next "The Amaz!ng Meeting" (ican’twaitican’twaitican’twait!), the fabubabe Rebecca have you ordered your calendar yet? The holidays are fast approaching!), and then this long rambling session with some idiot astronomer who talks about being naked, his dog, and other silly stuff.

Download the MP3 here.

Earlier today, I wrote about the National Science Teachers Association rejecting an offer to distribute DVDs of "An Inconvenient Truth" to its members.

Gerry Wheeler, Executive Director of the NSTA, responds to the controversy on the NSTA website:

NSTA policy states that the association cannot endorse any outside organization’s products and/or messages to its members. Therefore, we do not send any such products and/or messages directly to our members, regardless of the source.

If the Washington Post OpEd had mentioned that in the first place, there wouldn’t have been such a stir (in fact, the entire OpEd would have been unnecessary). Was this policy made clear to Laurie David, the author of that OpEd? I wonder. If so, why didn’t she mention it in her article? And if not, why not?

Wheeler goes on:

What was not mentioned in the op-ed is the fact that during conversations with Ms. David’s representative we suggested making the DVD available via alternative means of distribution (e.g. by providing a mailing list of our members to producers, announcing its availability in our publications, etc.). It appears that these alternative distribution mechanisms were unsatisfactory.

Hmmm, this casts a lot of doubt on David’s article now. Her whole point is that 1) NSTA refused to help her with the DVDs, and 2) the NSTA is influenced by the oil companies. How strong is that first point?

There still, however, is the question of the oil companies swaying NSTA policy:

Let me specifically address the programs outlined in the op-ed: ExxonMobil has been a long-time sponsor of the national network we call Building a Presence for Science. In this project we have identified a “point of contact” for science in over 40,000 school buildings. Originally conceived to provide a copy of the National Science Education Standards to each school, NSTA now regularly sends these points of contact useful information on science education that they share with teachers in their buildings. Not once has ExxonMobil asked to use this network for their own purposes. [emphasis mine]

It does sound like they have policy in place to avoid being influenced. That last sentence is kind of funny, in that it’s not the same as saying the information is not influenced ExxonMobil. However, that strikes me as syntactic pedantry on my part.

The Shell Oil Company funds national research science experts to present at our national conference, where they speak directly to science teachers about their field of research. NSTA chooses the scientists, invites the scientists, and hosts the scientists at these conferences. In addition, the Shell Oil Company sponsors the Shell Science Teaching award for K-12 science teachers who have had a positive impact on his or her students, school, and community through exemplary classroom teaching. This award program is administered by NSTA and the recipients are chosen by science teachers selected by NSTA.

Again, a stronger wording would have helped here, but also again it sounds like they are doing what they can to avoid being influenced.

Wheeler goes on:

Global warming is a very important science/societal issue. NSTA has always supported sound environmental science education.

Yikes! Better wording would have been preferred here! "Sound science" is a neocon buzzword for "science we approve of". Coincidence, I imagine.

However, I am still very concerned about the email the NSTA originally sent to Ms. David. She quotes the NSTA as saying:

Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place “unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters.” One of those supporters, it turns out, is the Exxon Mobil Corp.

It’s hard to see that this as taken out of context, and it really does sound like the NSTA was trying to protect its sponsors.

This is clearly a controversy that is not going to die down right away. But I still have some lingering questions:

1. Was Ms. David informed about the NSTA policy of not supporting outside organizations?
2. Was Ms. David informed that the NSTA would help her advertise the DVDs to their members?
3. If the NSTA is not influenced by sponsors, then why did they make the statement about "unnecessary risk" to their support?

I still won’t come out and accuse the NSTA of being swayed by sponsors, nor will I accuse Ms. David of being duplicitous, as the evidence supports neither conclusion. I still want to hear more, and, clearly, there is more going on here than was revealed in the Washington Post editorial. I don’t think this issue has been put to rest.

I have to add that in February 2006 Gerry Wheeler was on a panel with me at the American Association for the Advancement of Science . His passion for science and science education are not questioned in my mind. He clearly wants to do what is best for both.

I plan to continue to monitor this, and also the opinions posted on the NSTA discussion board.

When the New Horizons spacecraft launched in January of 2006, it was aimed at the planet Pluto.

Now it’s just going to Pluto.

Haha! Get it?

Anyway, it’s reached another cool milestone: its sensitive camera has spotted the distant planet object for the first time.

It’s labeled in that image, and yes it’s only a blip (click it for an animation). The images were taken in September over two days. Pluto can be identified among all those stars and cosmic ray hits on the detector because it moves along a path that was predicted using the combination of Pluto’s and New Horizons’ motions. Pluto was over 4 billion kilometers away from the probe when these images were taken. At that distance (if I’ve done my math correctly) Pluto was 0.1 arcseconds across: equivalent to the apparent size of a US quarter seen from 50 kilometers away. That’s tiny. So it’ll get better from here.

New Horizons will fly past Pluto in the year 2015. It doesn’t have the fuel to slow and orbit, so it’ll zip past, take loads of images and other data, and then head on out of the solar system and into interstellar space.