Blogs / Bad Astronomy

I’m taking a redeye to England tonight! I’ll be there for a day, then I’ll hop across the Channel to Geneva to begin The Great Large Hadron Collider Tour. Gia has some details on what we’ll be doing there, and with whom we’ll be doing it.

This will no doubt mess with my schedule (both internal and external), so I don’t know how much I’ll be able to blog over the next few days. But news keeps on a-coming, and I’ll try to stay on top of it. In the meantime, talk amongst yourselves. Watch my Hulu videos. Add yourself as a friend of mine on MySpace or Facebook. Or just go outside and enjoy things.

I’ve been getting email about a ridiculous story that a 13 year old boy showed that NASA was wrong about the impact risk from the asteroid Apophis. According to the story, NASA didn’t account for the chance of the asteroid hitting a satellite orbiting the Earth, which would change its course and up the odds of impact. There are about a zillion red flags in the story (no NASA scientist interviewed, the odds went from 1 in 45,000 to 1 in 450, why would impacting a tiny satellite change the course of a 300+ meter wide rock? and more, but I have been too busy traveling or preparing to travel to tackle it.

However, Cosmos4U has the details. I’m glad to say that so many people who emailed me about this were skeptical! This news story is clearly a total fabrication.

Also, there is a thread on Fark about this. Scroll down and keep your eyes open for some pictures people posted.
Hat tip to the bazillion people who told me about this, and the Fark stuff too.

I am very pleased to announce the start of a new project for me: short, high-quality astronomy videos posted on Hulu.com!

Before I bore you with details, here’s one of the first videos: The Cookbook of Galactic Cannibalism (after a very short ad).

There are two more up right now as well: Black Hole Death Rays and The Changing Face of Mars. They are on Hulu under the channel name Bad Astronomy.

These videos are a collaboration between producer/director Tom Lucas (who made such fantastic documentaries as "Runaway Universe" and "Supertwister"), cameraman Rich Lerner, and me. I met Tom a few years back when we worked together on the planetarium show "Black Holes: The Other Side of Infinity" (and the NOVA program that came out of that, "Monster in the Middle").

The idea for these videos was to make shorter (<5 minutes) but still high-quality mini-documentaries that are interesting, fun, and feature very cool animations from NASA and other sources. We created these three as a test to see how things go, and we have plans to make many more.

I’m pretty excited about this; I foresee a pretty good future here. We filmed these in hi-def so that even higher-quality footage can be available if needed, so these shorts can be used in a lot of venues. I’d love to see these getting into classrooms, for example.

And we’re looking at many different topics. Got any ideas? Feel free to leave comments here, but keep in mind the topic can’t be too broad (dark energy might be tough to tackle in less than 5 minutes, though it would be interesting to try — in fact, while writing that sentence I came up with an idea I might want to test out…), needs to have a "coolness" factor to it, and, of course, dynamite visuals.

We’ll be starting up more of these pretty soon, so stay tuned!

Update: Hulu.com is not available outside the US, but we will be putting the vids up on other sources which can be seen anywhere very soon.

Yeah, I’m running out of puns on that word.

But this time, people are seeing Jesus in a hospital lobby. Here’s one of the pictures:

While there is some vague resemblance to the way Jesus is portrayed by a lot of churches, if I saw that and thought it was real, I’d have nightmares for weeks. That’s like a cross between how Picasso and H.R. Giger would portray Charles Manson. Yikes.

But there you go. People, as usual, see what they want to see. I’ve probably watched too many History Channel specials.