Blogs / Bad Astronomy

On Wednesday morning/afternoon, the Moon will appear to pass directly in front of Venus for people in North America.

This kind of thing is called an occultation, and it doesn’t happen very often, so you should take the chance to watch. It won’t be easy! Since it happens in broad daylight, Venus will be hard to find. So will the Moon: it’ll be a thin crescent, just a few days before new.

The lunar-occultations website has a map of viewability and a table with times for big cities in the US (Boulder’s not listed, grumble grumble, but Denver is close enough). For me, the Moon’s disk will slip in front of Venus at about 1:25 local time, and Venus will reappear at 2:06. The Moon will be about 23 degrees above the horizon, so it’ll clear the mountain range to my west. If it’s not cloudy, I’ll have a decent shot at seeing this.

Again, though, it’s not easy. The table linked gives the azimuth of the event as well, the direction to face. 0 is north, 90 east, 180 south, and 270 west. For me, it’ll be at an azimuth of 224 degrees, or southwest. So I’ll face southwest, and look about 24 degree up (roughly, twice the width of your outstretched fist). I’ll be using binoculars at least at first; that’ll make the Moon and Venus easier to see, and then I’ll test my eyes and look for it unaided. You can see pictures of an occultation from 2007 at the popastro site.

The actual event is pretty cool; the Moon and Venus will appear to get closer and closer, and then bloop! Venus will disappear. Since Venus is actually a disk, and not a point source, it’ll actually take a brief moment for it to disappear; it’s not all at once. It depends on the phases of the Moon and Venus, and the position on the disk of the Moon where Venus gets occulted (if it’s near the middle the event is quicker, near the poles and it takes longer). It should take somewhere between 20 seconds and a minute, if I’ve done my math right.

So go out and take a look!

Hat tip to Amanda for announcing this.

An article by D’Arcy Doran from the AP is reporting that back in WWII, the UK hired an astrologer to help them fight the Nazis.

Oddly enough, Louis de Wohl turned out to be a total fraud, and the British government soon found themselves in trouble.

A series of events led his work to be introduced to Sir Charles Hambro, the head of Britain’s Special Operations Executive, who hired de Wohl, and gave him a great apartment in an exclusive area of London. De Wohl eventual won the rank of army Captain. However, he soon became a bit of a problem, making grandiose claims about himself and publically embarrassing high-ranking officers.

His exploits are outlined in the article, but here’s my favorite part:

According to the released MI5 correspondence, senior officers offered a number of proposals on how to “dispose” of de Wohl, including interning him in a camp or moving him to a remote corner of the country. Two other options are blanked out.

I would love to see what was blanked out.

Eventually, the Brits caught on:

I have never liked Louis de Wohl _ he strikes me as a charlatan and an imposter,” reads the first line in the astrologer’s file. The letter is typical and appeared to be signed by Dick White, who went on to become the head of Britain’s domestic spy agency, MI5, in the 1950s.

[…]

“I have no doubt if I checked up his successes, I would see that he had more than an equal number of failures, but I have not the inclination nor the time to do so,” Hambro wrote.

Well, duh. But happily, nothing like that could ever happen in the US…

The past few days have seen a rise, yet again, in trolls and people swearing in the comments, so I will repost my comments policy.

Remember, if you see a troll, don’t bother responding — when I delete their comments, yours will look a little funny hanging out there. Just let me know and I’ll take care of it.

The commenting policy is posted below. Learn it. Love it. Listen to it, or you’ll be wasting your time commenting here.

I didn’t want to do this, I really didn’t, but my hand is forced.

For some reason, this past week, I have had to edit a comment every day because someone has used "bad" words in it. I like this blog to remain, if not kid-friendly, then young-adult friendly. That means getting it into schools and such, and that means I have to be a nanny.

So here is my policy for commenting here. It is neither complete nor unchangeable. But this will do for now.

1) Be polite.

That’s it. That’s my rule.

That should be easy, right? Don’t go attacking other people, don’t swear, don’t be a jerk.

I reserve the right to edit out strong language and such. I will also delete comments that go over the line, or try to sell a product, or because I feel like it. OK, I won’t do that last part. The point is, this is my blog, and if you are being a jerk in some way I will take action. That may sound rather vague. Too bad. There is no line in the sand that says Here be good, there be jerk.

Look, when you comment on a blog, it’s like you’re in that person’s house. Be polite. Flush the toilet when you’re done, or, better yet, don’t foul the place up in the first place.

Simple, right?

The Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, arrived safely at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center today, and is being prepped for launch. It’ll head into Earth orbit on a Delta-II rocket, and the launch is set for May 16th at 11:45 a.m. Eastern time.

I’m excited about this; I worked on GLAST education for six years, and I know what this machine can do. The images it provides of gamma-ray sources in the sky won’t look like Hubble pictures, but they very well may revolutionize how we understand the high-energy Universe. Black holes and gamma-ray bursts are its primary targets, but it will also detect pulsars, the Sun (solar flares can generate gamma rays) and maybe, just maybe, dark matter — there are some weird ideas that dark matter particles generate gamma rays when they annihilate each other. That’s really speculative, but GLAST will help put some numbers to the idea at the very least.

Remember, the deadline to rename GLAST is March 31! Get those names sent in.

Planetary nebulae are too cool.

When a star like the Sun dies, it goes through a series of episodes where it blows off dense winds, vast volumes of gas which expand out from the star in exotic shapes. This is caused by paroxysms in the star’s core; at its advanced age, fusion of one element into another is unstable, and sometimes huge amounts of energy are suddenly dumped into the star’s outer layers. These outer layers respond by swelling and shrinking, and this in turn is reflected in the winds the star blows.

NGC 2371, seen here in a new Hubble Space Telescope picture, is just such a nebula. The winds from the star have slammed into each other, creating the odd puffy shape. As the star sheds its overcoat of material, the hot, dense core is exposed — you can see it as the pinkish-white dot in the center. That color isn’t real; in fact the star, now called a white dwarf, would be bluish or intensely white. But it’s hot, no doubt: it’s over 130,000 degrees Celsius — and that’s not even the hottest one known, which is well over 200,000 degrees!

At that temperature, the star floods the gas with ultraviolet light, which ionizes the material and makes it glow in the same way as a neon sign. In this particular image, sulfur and nitrogen glow red, hydrogen is green, and oxygen is blue. The colors aren’t real; they were just chosen for aesthetics. In general, hydrogen is reddish and oxygen is green.

I was intrigued by the two pink stubs you can in the nebula, on opposite sides of the central star. Those are called FLIERs, for Fast Low-Ionization Emission Regions (I have details on what they are at that link). Their exact formation mechanism isn’t well-understood, but they always appear like that, on opposite sides of the star, so some symmetric shaping force is at work.

I had to laugh when I saw them; they looked like the electrical studs in the neck of the classic Frankenstein’s monster. Too bad I don’t get to name nebulae! I guess, though, after a second look the studs are too high. They look like ears, maybe, or antennae. There was a robot in an old movie or a book cover; I can’t remember, but it had little antennae sticking out of its head just like this. Anyone remember what I’m talking about? Stuff like that makes me crazy when I can’t remember it. Like an itch you can’t scratch.

Anyway, if you like planetary nebulae, then search the blog here for more; I’ve written about them quite bit, since I studied them for both my Masters and PhD. The Hubble website has dozens and dozens of them, too.

… then I present you with the newest evidence: he says that "there’s stong evidence" that vaccines cause autism.

If you haven’t heard, the idea that vaccines are linked with autism is one of the biggest example of medical antiscientific garbage there is. Vaccinations have been tested over and over again, and no link whatsoever has been found. None. Nothing. Nada.

But why believe me? From the article linked above:

The Centers for Disease Control says “There is no convincing scientific evidence of harm caused by the low doses of thimerosal in vaccines, except for minor reactions like redness and swelling at the injection site.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics says”No scientific data link thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines with any pediatric neurologic disorder, including autism.”

The Food and Drug Administration conducted a review in 1999 — the year thimerosal was ordered to be removed from most vaccines — and said that it “found no evidence of harm from the use of thimerosal as a vaccine preservative, other than local hypersensitivity reactions.”

The Institute of Medicine’s Immunization Safety Review Committee concluded “that the body of epidemiological evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism.”

And a study of California Department of Developmental Services data published last month indicated that there was “an increase in autism in California despite the removal of thimerosal from most vaccines.”

But, like 9/11 truthers or Moon hoaxers, antivax people still make the same tired claims.

Kinda makes you wonder about McCain a wee bit, doesn’t it? Try reading Respectful Insolence, or Cosmic Variance about him.

McCain used to make sense to me, up until recently when his pandering to the far right wackos turned into a nonstop dizzying spin that seems to be made of him trying to take both sides of every issue imaginable. His garbage stance on evolution was the first time I heard him brown-nosing the antiscience crowd, which was bad enough. But the antivaccination people are on a trajectory to do real harm to people all over the world, and the ones most likely to be hurt first are kids, who need vaccinations. Ironically, they want to help kids — many true believers are, incredibly sadly, parents with autistic children — but in the end, by grasping onto fantasy as opposed to reality, they are achieving the exact opposite.

And John McCain wants to help. Perfect.

I saw a commercial for an upcoming movie last night, and thought, I could make a Doctor Who cartoon of that!

Too late.

Oh well. Click to see the whole strip. My idea would have been funnier, but I have to give kudos to the pun at the end. Still, no one will top this one any time soon I think.