Blogs / Bad Astronomy

It’s difficult to express just how fracking impressive the Large Hadron Collider is. You really have to be there to understand how overwhelming and ginormous it is. Still and all, maybe the video I took of the tour will help get the idea across (if you go to that YouTube page, there is a link right under the video that allows you to watch it in higher quality. I recommend doing that).

ATLAS and CMS are detectors, built to detect the shrapnel from the collisions of protons moving just a whisper slower than light itself. For the cast of characters and a description of this tour, take a look at my earlier post describing it. There are pictures there from the journey as well.

My live video live chat starts at 3:00 p.m. Mountain Time (21:00 UT) today (Sunday April 27). If you look below and see/hear me nattering away about black holes or UFOs, then you’re in. I urge you to go to the UStream page, though, so you can participate in the chat room. If you want to change your nickname there, type "/nick JoeRogan" (or whatever) in the text field.

See you there! Oh wait, no I won’t. But you’ll see me.

Reminder: I’m doing a live video chat today at 3:00 Mountain time.

Another day, another grainy, out-of-focus, weird UFO picture trumpeted by the media. Well, not so much the media as The Sun.

The headline screams, "Tourist snaps UFO in Croydon" and is accompanied by what one guesses is the best of the series of pix.

The object is reported as "speeding through the sky" and the photographer, Anastasiya Gavrilenko (which, I must say, is an awesome name), said,

It was quite large and moving really fast. It was size of a plane but did not look like one – it looked more like a big mushroom.

I’m not saying it was a mushroom — that’s as likely as it being an actual spaceship — but it’s resemblance to a hat being blown across the sky by the wind is perhaps more a clue of its origin.

…then again, we’re talking Croydon here. Maybe it’s the Fourth Doctor’s hat. Call Sarah Jane!

Tip o’ the tin foil beanie to Fark, as usual, and I note that they now have a Sarah Jane joke in the comments as well, but I was first.