Blogs / Bad Astronomy

I just heard that Richard Hoagland will be dumping a big steaming pile of conspiracy theory on Dennis Miller’s radio show on Monday. It airs at 9:00 a.m. here in Colorado so I may listen. But it’ll be tough: you can guess my opinion Hoagland (actually, it’s documented thoroughly so you need not guess) and while I used to find Miller very funny on SNL, his sojourn into far-right wing nutbaggery is painful to bear.

But I take on great torture for my beloved BABLoggees, so if I remember (and don’t blot it out of my mind) I’ll give it a shot.

Tip o’ the tin foil hat to Jim Oberg.

The space-blog-roundup Carnival of Space #36 is up at Steinn’s place. Go read about spacey things!

It looks like Mars dodged a bullet. Well, an asteroid.

2007 WD5 will miss the Red Planet on January 30, just like most of us assumed it would. Even at best, it had a 4% chance of an impact, but now it’s very clear it’ll miss. The JPL NEO website even has a cool animation showing how the best estimates of the asteroid position have increased in accuracy over the past few weeks, and now Mars is well outside the region where the asteroid will be. Or vice versa. Whatever.

Anyway, too bad. It would’ve been cool to see it get smacked.

I posted a few days ago that NASA’s MESSENGER probe is headed toward a rendezvus with Mercury on Monday. In the comments, BigBob noted that the first image has been returned!

This was taken on January 11, when the spacecraft was still 1.7 million kilometers from the planet. On Monday, it will pass about 200 km over the surface (yikes!). It will fly on, making two more passes of Mercury over time before settling into orbit, and making a detailed map of this planet. That’ll be in 2011, so the images we see from this first of three flybys will have to do you for now.

I’m pleased to tell my readers that a new skeptically-based medical blog is now online: Science Based Medicine. It has five bloggers, all MDs, posting regularly one day a week. Skeptics will be familiar with two names on the blogger list: Steve Novella, from The Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast, and my friend Harriet Hall, the SkepDoc, who has long been a friend of real medicine (and who tried valiantly to make me feel better when I was attacked by a particularly vicious norovirus during a visit to Seattle).

The attacks on real science by antiscience forces is nowhere more important than in the health field, and SBM’s pentavirate of doctors will take an unflinching look at this particular flavor of evil. Set your bookmarks and feed readers!