Stuart at Astronomy Blog has posted an interactive timeline of astronomy blogs, showing when they went online. I thought mine was one of the early ones, but now I see things were already ramping up when I joined the fray.

The SIMILE software used to create the timeline has been around a while. I fiddled with it a year or so ago, wondering what I could use it for; I was at Sonoma State at the time and was thinking we could use it to show benchmarks in the construction of satellites. I like Stuart’s use of it, though.

I now I link to Emily a lot, but it’s because she’s just so cool. To wit:

How can you not love a picture like that? And it looks more like a face than anything Cydonia ever produced.

Randi has announced the names of just some of the guest speakers who will be at The Amaz!ng Meeting 6 in June in Las Vegas. They include the usual (stellar) suspects: Penn & Teller, Michael Shermer, Richard Wiseman (a friend of mine seriously confused the two of us, thinking a picture of him on the cover of Skeptic magazine was me!), and Christopher Hitchens. I’ll be there too, of course.

The keynote speaker will be my old friend Neil Tyson, perhaps the most famous astronomer alive. He has his own PBS show, has written several books, and is a great and thoughtful speaker (and has a voice to match). If you’ve seen any astronomy show in the past, oh, three years at least, you’ve seen him.

Oh — PZ will be there too. If you missed our blogger meetup, well, here’s your chance.

There are others who have been invited, or so I hear told, and when I learn more, well, so will you!

This picture of a crater from Mercury came out a little while ago, but I’ve been busy. Better late than never. Check it:

What do we make of this?

1) Mercury is copyrighted. Everyone says Mercury looks like the Moon, but the Moon is actually several hundred million years younger than Mercury. This means the Moon is in violation of the law.

2) Some say this looks like a telephone in the crater, but that’s silly. Who has a phone that looks like this any more?

3) Ralph Rene and Bart Sibrel are right (scroll down a little bit to "Note R").

4) The feature is actually a U, not a C, and therefore Mercury is kosher.

5) It’s an angel. Hey, it looks as much like one as this does.

What do you see? I mean, what do you C?

On February 4th, NASA will use the Deep Space Network — a series of large radio antennas used to monitor probes to other planets — to beam the Beatles song "Across the Universe" to the star Polaris.

This is a publicity stunt designed to celebrate two anniversaries: NASA’s 50th this year, and the 40th of the recording of the song by the Liverpudlian quartet. I’m fairly ambivalent about such things; it’s not a big deal, doesn’t cost much, NASA wouldn’t do it if it put any missions at risk. While I won’t stand on my chair and cheer for this, it does raise awareness of NASA. It’s also kinda cute.

They could, however, have picked a better star. Polaris is almost certainly devoid of planets. It is an older star called a supergiant: it has stopped fusing hydrogen in its core, and has expanded outward to be a vast, bloated, incredibly luminous beacon. If it had any planets once they are probably either vaporized — eaten by the star as it expanded — or fried beyond recognition as the star heated up. It also has a companion star that is a bit hotter and more massive than the Sun which orbits the supergiant just a couple of billion kilometers out. This makes it really unlikely that any planets could be in that system; the dance of gravity would make things a mess there. There are lots of nearby stars with planets that would have made a better choice, and one close to 40 light years away would have made even more sense (since it’s been 40 years since the song was recorded).

Still, everyone has heard of Polaris, and since it’s fraught with misconceptions, maybe this will raise awareness not just of NASA and the Beatles, but of an important star, too.

Also, Carolyn Porco is a huge Beatles fan. I imagine this’ll make her pretty happy.

That’s Carolyn on the right, in white. I’m almost positive the redheaded man is my friend Kevin Grazier… and some of you may be familiar with his work as well. Hmmm… I have another thought about using the Deep Space Network for communication…

Evidently PZ smoted a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in a debate over evolution. The DI is the leading "think tank" (man, how hard was that to type!) for Intelligent Design creationism in this country, and is largely responsible for the laughing stock that Dover, Pennsylvania became.

PZ debated Brian Geoffrey Simmons, and evidently it was a true debacle. You can download an MP3 of the hour-long train wreck here, and I look forward to listening to it. It sounds like it has lots of squishy biology in it, but I’ll sit through that just to hear one of those DI liars get his brain squeezed.

We are having an incredible wind storm, and it woke me up. So I’m in my office surfing, and see that Venus and Jupiter are very close together in the sky this (Friday) morning. This is called a conjunction, and it’s something of an illusion: Venus is much closer to Earth than Jupiter, but in the cosmic dance of the planets, they happen to line up in the sky.

If you happen to read this before dawn on Friday (it’s hours away Mountain time as I write this), face East and look low to the horizon. They should be obvious enough: they are the third and fourth brightest objects in the sky (after the Sun and Moon).

Conjunctions are pretty, so if you happen to be up, check out this sparkling pair.