Blogs / Bad Astronomy

I don’t remember making this speech, but in my defense I did say they’d wipe my brain.

But the evidence is against this being real. It says:

A seemingly humbled Plait accepted an award and a check from the alliance.

When I fake sincere modesty I’m really good at it, so the writer being suspicious is proof this wasn’t real.

Hat tip to BABlogee, um, Reporter X.

The NASA spacecraft MESSENGER swept past Mercury today, and everything looks good. Some science data were returned today, but no images have been posted as yet. Tomorrow at noon EST it will point its antenna homeward and send us the rest of the data, and I’m hoping we’ll see some images then.

The image here was taken on the 13th, from a distance of 760,000 km from the planet. You can already see many features! I can’t wait for the good stuff to come in.

BalloonFOs is my new term (I just made it up!) to describe the kind of UFOs people see that are just unresolved bright dots in the sky. This is probably the most common type of UFO seen: something far away, too small to see any actual shape, moving across the sky slowly, flying in formation with other lights, etc. etc.

The latest is a New Years sighting over San Diego. This is pretty interesting footage, but they look like candle balloons to me, an easy-to-make do-it-yourself hot air balloon made out of shopping bags and candles (someone in the comments on that link also said this). In fact that’s my second guess; my first is that this was something involving the Navy, since there is a VERY large naval base right there at Coronado in San Diego. But either way, I’m pretty sure there is a more down-to-Earth answer to sightings like this, without invoking aliens.

I just listened to the Richard C. Hoagland interview on the Dennis Miller show. It was actually interesting. RCH made the usual brain dead claims of rocks on Mars shaped like robot heads (I am not making that up, folks; that’s the level he’s at) and Nazi scientists at NASA. Miller was polite — he seemed to enjoy talking to RCH, which is understandable — but in the end was pretty skeptical. He said he would read Hoagland’s book on the "secret NASA history "… but he also came right out and said that he thinks all this stuff from RCH is a "put on" (Miller’s words). In other words, Miller thinks RCH is making it all up.

I’ll add that Hoagland said three things that piqued my interest. One, he said his Enterprise Mission page is a "public policy" website. I almost spat my coffee all over my monitor.

Two, it sure sounded to me like he admitted that he was basing his claims of glass domes and spires on the Moon on third generation pictures — that is, pictures made from pictures made from negatives — which pretty much clinches that what he is saying is ridiculous. When examining data, you need to use the original pictures. If you don’t, you risk getting hair, dust, and artifacts (glare, smudges, etc.)in the prints. And of course, to any rational person this is exactly what is seen in his images. He says this himself on his very own website where he debunks the Moon Hoax (interestingly, I cannot seem to find that debunking on his site anymore; anyone else see it anywhere?), where he shows the famous C-rock is actually due to a hair that got on the negative.

And third, he said that he was a "NASA consultant at Goddard" — that’s an exact quotation from RCH. That’s a very interesting claim! I’ll have to look into that when I get a chance.

Anyway, I was surprised and pleased to see Miller be so rational. Especially after the patently ridiculous political comments Miller made in the segment before. Oh well, I’ll be happy to let the fringe pundits and conspiracy theorists eat their own. Saves me the trouble.

The Sun is a variable star. Sunspots — dark regions on the surface of the Sun — increase in number over the years, peak, and then slowly decline once again. The pattern repeats every 11 years. Sunspots are regions of magnetic activity, and that is what fuels the massive eruptions of solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) off the Sun. These can play havoc with all sorts of human activities: radio communications, GPS satellites, and even lay waste to our power grid (Quebec had a massive blackout in 1989 due to solar activity).

Obviously, astronomers pay close attention to the Sun.

The last cycle waned a few years back, and our nearest star has been pretty quiet. The predictions were that the new cycle would start up soon… and it looks like it’s poking its head through the door.

This image (from SOHO) shows the newest spot to blemish the Sun. We can tell it’s part of the new cycle because of the Sun’s magnetic field: sunspots reverse their (magnetic north and south) polarity every cycle, and this spot shows that reversal. So welcome the first spot for Cycle 24!

The spot looks dinky, but don’t be fooled. First of all, it’s several thousand kilometers across — the Sun is big big big. Second, we’ve already seen some activity from it; two blasts of energy have emanated from it since it was spotted a week ago. Magnetic field lines get tangled up, and can suddenly reconnect, making huge explosions on the surface (which can trigger solar flares and CMEs). There is a cool movie of this available, too.

I didn’t know very much about the details of the Sun’s magnetic field and cycles until recently, which is when I started researching them for my chapter on solar flares for my upcoming book Death from the Skies! … and then I learned a lot. This is a fascinating topic, and astronomers discover more about the Sun literally every day. I’ll be very excited to keep track of Cycle 24, at the very least so I can figure out how to milk it for book publicity.

First he says the Moon Landings were fake, and then when I put him on notice about it, he "suddenly" does a flip flop.

And now Stephen Colbert mocks the meteorite market. He even calls them "meteors", and mispronounces "achondrites"!

Oh, Mr. Colbert! Must I make yet another video which will be misinterpreted by hundreds of clueless YouTube n00bs?

When I found out that the renowned liars for God, Answers in Genesis, were looking for papers for a new journal they are publishing, literally my very first thought was, "I wonder if I could write up a fake paper for submission?"

Now I see I can win a prize for it!

These AiG guys are among the worst of the bottom feeders for fundamentalist nonsense. They sponsored the creation (har har) of the creation museum in Kentucky, as one fine example.

I also found out the journal has two papers published. I am neither a biologist nor a geologist (sigh, I love geology, and someday I’ll learn a lot more about it), so I am not qualified to judge the articles. Anyone out there wanna take a stab at them?