You know I have a good eye for pareidolia.

This one is the best, ever.

That’s a real feature on Mars, taken by the Mars Global Surveyor. And if you’re clueless what I’m talking about, try here.

As a double inside joke, I almost titled this “M-O-O-N, that spells Mars!” but I figured like three of you would get it.

A new paper just published by a team of planet-hunters shows that theoretically speaking, not only can Alpha Centauri have planets, it should have them.

A bit of background: Alpha Cen is actually a binary star, with one star much like the Sun (called Alpha Cen A) and the other a bit cooler (Alpha Cen B). A third star, Proxima Centauri, orbits very far out from the central binary.

Alpha Cen is the closest star system to the Sun that we know of, at a distance of 4.3 light years, or roughly 40 trillion km (24 trillion miles). Since it’s close, it’s one of the most common stars used in science fiction.

Planet formation around one star in a binary can be tricky; the disk from which the planets form can be disrupted by the presence of another star. However, a team of astronomers including Javiera Guedes and Greg Laughlin used computer simulations to see how planets could form in the Alpha Cen system specifically. They did what’s called a Monte Carlo test, running the simulation over and over again with slightly different input parameters every time (like, disk density, composition, and so on).

Remarkably, what they found is that they got a terrestrial (rocky) planet about the size of Earth orbiting Alpha Cen B every single time, and in many cases was at the right distance from the star to have liquid water.

Holy Haleakala.

A planet like that would be difficult to detect if it exists, but not impossible. In fact, not only do we have the tech right now to do it, but paper co-author Debra Fischer is looking for such a planet. It’s possible that we may find such a planet in just a few more years.

It’s difficult to say what that would do for awareness of astronomy; I can’t help but think it would make a huge splash. First, to find a planet orbiting the nearest star, and second, an Earth-like planet… wow. Still, since the result is still only theoretical, it’s too early to get too excited about this.

Well, maybe just a little excited. It’s hard not to be. But we’ll see soon enough.

The next Space Shuttle launch, this time for Endeavour, is scheduled for March 11 at (yikes) 2:28 a.m. Eastern time.

I won’t be live-Twittering it.

However, NASA has a fleet of support stuff for you, the launch junkie, to learn all about STS 123, including a web site, a launch blog, and a live interview with STS 127 astronaut Julie Payette at 11:30 a.m Eastern time on March 10.

Night launches are very cool, but I’m not sure I want to stay up past 1:00 local time to watch it all. We’ll see.

What hath God wrought?

For years, the conservative movement in this country has increasingly used religion as a weapon, sometimes with extreme Machiavellian motives. Now, of course, it’s impossible for anyone to get elected to any position of authority — Repub or Dem — without declaring themselves not just as religious, but as a certain type of religion. If you’re not Judeo-Christian, you might as well give up now.

This is coming back to haunt them.

Right now, John McCain is dealing with backlash from being endorsed by John Hagee, an extremely venomous far-right snake. Hagee is many things: a bigot, a misogynist, a war-monger, and a plain old creepy guy who wants us to attack Iran to bring on the Biblical end times.

I think it’s not only OK to jump on McCain for accepting such an endorsement, it’s required. Worse — far worse — is that McCain actively sought Hagee’s endorsement for months. McCain wanted this.

But it gets more interesting. Hagee, who claims his church is non-denominational, is not so enamored of Catholicism. To say the least.

Enter Bill Donohue, a guy who is the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and himself a bigot and something of a nutbag. He has been railing against Hagee and McCain, saying that McCain should reject the endorsement of Hagee. Mind you, Donohue has been clear that it’s only Hagee’s hatred of the Catholic church that he finds so offensive. Apparently, all the other horrid things Hagee has said are fine with Donohue.

I forget. In which part of the New Testament does Jesus preach unbridled hatred?

I would find this situation funny if it weren’t so deadly important. The far-right religious groups have slowly and very successfully grown to be a huge influence over the political landscape in the past 20 years or so. To become a leader in this country it’s simply accepted that you have to brownnose them.

But look what that cozying up to these fundamentalist hate-mongers has done. They are feeding on their own now. And it gets crazier: there have been numerous attacks by the far right on Obama, intimating he’s a Muslim, but Obama is himself Christian. Self-proclaimed moral arbiters have no issues slinging as much mud as they can, hoping it sticks, despite the Bible having some pretty clear things to say about such issues.

There is a clear lesson here: when you beg for the hand of fundamentalist hate-mongers, you will suffer the slings and arrows of the other fundamentalist hate-mongers. Perhaps, then, it’s best to reject them all.

McCain did reject them, back in 2000. But now he is actively and quite hypocritically courting them. He brought this on himself, the end-product of kowtowing to fundamentalism. They have been actively engendering such a disaster for years, so they too have brought this on themselves.

The vast majority of religious people are good, decent folks — we may disagree on some of the basics of their religion, but I know these people want to do good, and that hypocrites like Hagee and Donohue don’t speak for them. But as I have pointed out time and again, if you don’t speak up, then these people speak for you. It’s very hard to find moderate religious people in the media, but they exist. Support them.

And finally, I would suggest the hate-mongers among the fundamentalists actually sit down and read Galatians VI. Because even after supposedly reading the Bible their whole lives, and supposedly basing their lives on it, they still haven’t quite figured out that as ye sow, so shall ye reap.

Mark your calendars! Spacefest 2009 will be held on February 19-22, 2009, in San Diego, California!

Spacefest is a convention for space enthusiasts. The inaugural meeting was last year, and it was a tremendous time (see my reports here, here, and here). Almost every living astronaut who walked on the Moon was there, and let me tell you how thrilling that was! I was there to give my Moon Hoax talk, and Carolyn Porco gave a tremendous speech about Cassini. Andy Chaikin gave an Apollo talk (his book A Man on the Moon is considered to be the Bible of Apollo, and Tom Hanks based his HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon" on that book). My buddy Seth Shostak from SETI was there, as well as famed comet hunter David Levy.

I’m not sure who will be there next time, though many astronauts have already signed up. I have as well! I’ll have to find something else to talk about, but happily I’ll have a new book to plug, so I’m sure I can come up with something.

Here’s a taste of what to expect…