Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Welcome DailyKos folks once again! I see Darksyde linked here, so thanks for visiting. I suspect you’ll like my stance on politics, too, so check out, for example, my post on Mullah Huckabee and the rest of the site. Enjoy!

Update II: Emily has a lengthy discussion of this image, with some typically fine insight.

Whoa. Just: whoa.

This is the highest res image yet returned from the MESSENGER spacecraft of Mercury, taken when it was 27,000 kilometers from the planet (after the encounter).

Mercury rotates three times on its axis (a "day") for every two times it goes around the Sun (a "year"), so there is all sorts of weird phasing that goes on (something like the Moon always showing the same face to Earth, but a bit more complicated). Not only that, but its orbit is highly elliptical, ranging from 46 to 70 million km from the Sun. All this together means that the same half of Mercury is facing the Sun every other^* time it reaches perihelion (closest point in its orbit to the Sun).

Do you see that circular feature to the upper right, slightly lighter in color than the surrounding plains? That’s Caloris Basin, the Basin of Heat. It’s called that because when Mercury reaches perihelion, that spot is close to being aimed right at the Sun. It’s one of the worsts spot on Mercury to live, if you’re considering a winter home there. Caloris Basin (formed in some ancient and very large impact) is over 1300 kilometers across — roughly as big as Texas. The mountains ringing it are 2 km high.

Because of the weird spin/orbit coupling, when Mariner 10 passed Mercury in 1974, it never was able to see the western rim of Caloris Basin. But there it is, right there, seen by human eyes for the very first time.

Awesome.

The cratering is lovely. Mercury is literally saturated with craters; a new impact is likely to wipe out more craters than it would form. There are rays visible, too, streaks of material ejected after an impact. We see those on the Moon as well. It looks like there are more craters near the left edge, but I think that’s an illusion; to them the Sun is low on the horizon and rim shadows are longer. That exaggerates the crateriness of the craters there, while ones under the Sun have short shadows, making them hard to see.

All in all, wow. Wowee wow wow.

And this is just the first close up image! We’ll be getting more in a few days, and then more again in the next flyby, and then, in 2011, we’ll get as many images of this tiny, hot, battered, dense and neglected planet as we can handle.

Look what we did! Man, I love this stuff.

^* Well, nuts. Commenter Solomon pointed out I messed up this description; I originally left the word "other" out. Oops. I put it in, and thank Solomon for finding this!

I was going to sit down and write a lengthy diatribe about how Huckabee is insane, and wants to turn this country into a theocracy the likes of which hasn’t been seen since, well, the Taliban, but then PZ goes and beats me to it. I wouldn’t use that NSFW language on my blog, but you can bet I’m thinking it.

And here’s the money quote from Mullah Huckabee himself:

“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution,” Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. “But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.”

Actually, he’s not only demented, he’s wrong: the Bible has been rewritten countless times by small groups of men (that’s why there are different versions, Huck), but changing the Constitution requires a 2/3 majority in both the Senate and House, and then a 3/4 majority of state legislatures approving the proposed amendment. That’s a lot harder, which is why we have so few amendments.

Voting for Huckabee is essentially casting out your freedoms forever. Given everything — anything — he has said, I used to be amused thinking that anyone would take him at all seriously. Now I’m terrified too many people will.

You know what’s fun about irony? How ironic it is.

BABloggee Brian McCarty sends me the wonderful news (via the Straight Dope Message Board) that The Astrological Magazine had to close down shop. That’s good enough news, of course… but it gets better.

Why, you may ask, did it shut down?

Unforeseen circumstances.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I love reality.

I just heard from Emily at the Planetary Society Blog that due to a problem with the Ulysses solar-observing spacecraft, the downloading of images of Mercury from MESSENGER will almost certainly be delayed until tomorrow, Wednesday. They might download a single image tonight, but that’s iffy.

Emily has details, as usual.

Maybe I should have known this already, but Will Smith is a scientologist (link mildly NSFW).

Nuts. I like his acting, and he seems funny and cool. But he’s clearly a lunatic. Scientology is such tremendous garbage it makes the Moon Hoax look like brain surgery.

Of course, Tom Cruise is still a complete freaking nutbag:

Update: Sigh. Scientologists are two things (well, three, if you count pure evil): predictable, and litigious. The video was taken down. Oh well, it just had Tom Cruise rambling on and on about how scientology is wonderful, and can cure and do anything, except save a tanking career and make you not look foolish.

UPDATE II: Gawker.com has the video, and they are promising not to take it down. Go there to have your thetans inflated.

Noreen Grice is a treasure.

A few years ago, she was running the planetarium show in a Boston planetarium when a group of blind kids came in to the theater. After the show was over, she asked them what they thought about it, and they said it "stunk".

Well, of course. But what can you do?

I suspect most of us would just feel badly about it and move on. But not Noreen. What she did was create a book about astronomy for the blind. Called Touch the Universe, it had images from Hubble Space Telescope overlaid with vacuum-formed plastic sheets that created an actual 3D version of the image, so that blind people could feel what the object looked like.

Amazing.

And now she has created her fifth book in the series, Touch the Invisible Sky (available soon from Ozone Publishing). It has images from Hubble, the Spitzer (infrared) Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

I have seen children use Noreen’s books before, and the look on their faces when they can actually feel the stripes on Jupiter is… well, it’s incredible. What Noreen has done is nothing less than open the door on astronomy for an entire segment of the population that had been excluded. She’s a hero.

Watch this embedded video (click on it to start it) to get a taste of what this incredible woman is about (if it doesn’t play, try the version at the Newswise or the Hubble press release).

I can’t help but think of the central irony of this book: it’s created for people who are visually impaired, but it shows images from the invisible part of the electromagnetic spectrum: infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays… light that none of us can see. In X-rays, we are all of us blind. We need very fancy and expensive telescopes to be able to detect this form of light from astronomical objects at all.

It’s a message I think we should all be reminded of every now and again.

I had nothing at all to do with this book, but I’ve met Noreen a few times, and for some silly reason that makes me all sorts of proud. Several of my friends were involved in this and Noreen’s other projects as well, so I would like to thank Simon Steele, Doris Daou, Skip Barker (I remember talking to Skip about the first book, and he said he had to help her do this, and I was never prouder of him), Steve Maran, Ray Villard, and Lynn Cominsky for their work with Noreen.

Good on all of you.

Update: Just a few minutes after I posted this, the (Hubble) Space Telescope Science Institute posted a press release about it.

I have decided that every now and again I will post some administrative stuff, to remind readers of a few things that might get buried in the normal firehose flow of the blog.

1) I’m on quite a few social networks! You can add me as a friend/subscribe to my stuff on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Mahalo, Flickr, and YouTube.

2) If you like something you see here, please click the Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon and/or Slashdot button. I put them at the top of every article to make it easy. Spread the love! I check Digg’s space section at least twice a day to see what’s hot, and you should too.

3) There is a whole big website attached to this blog.

4) I have a policy on commenting here, which basically boils down to "Don’t be a jerk." Still, please read that link for details. I also have a statement on my posts about politics and religion. There is a link on every blog page about it, right under my logo to the right.

5) Did you know I shill stuff? I have a bookstore and a Cafe Press store.

6) As time goes on, I’ll probably add more stuff to this list.

That’s it. Thanks!