Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Update: I have posted an updated version of this story, along with an incredible picture of the crescent Moon just 10 minutes before it was new.

Not a world-stopping bit of news, but cool and interesting: the youngest new Moon ever has been spotted. It was so young, in fact, that it was actually not yet quite new.

Here’s the deal: the Moon goes around the Earth (stop me if I’m going too fast). Once every orbit (roughly once per month) it passes near the Sun in the sky. The Moon’s orbit is tilted with respect to the Earth’s around the Sun, so it doesn’t pass directly in front of the Sun every orbit, and sometimes it’s farther "above" or "below" the Sun in the sky than other times.

The Moon is officially new once it passes that closest point to the Sun in the sky. But think about it: it passes very close to the Sun (never more than 5 degrees, about the width of three or so fingers held at arms length). That means you have to do this observation while the Sun is up! Or just after it sets. Either way, this is no small thing.

So what Martin Elsässer did was see the Moon before it actually passed the Sun, just five minutes before it was new.

So I guess what he saw was the oldest old Moon, but close enough. There is a sortof sport among some astronomers to spot the youngest Moon, and Martin Elsässer has set that bar considerably higher. This picture, from Herr Elsässer’s site itself, shows why this is such a difficult task:

That image was taken when the Moon was still 19 degrees from the Sun. Imagine when it’s 5 degrees! So hats off to Herr Elsässer. That’s an amazing feat.

Regular readers of this blog know that I turn a jaundiced eye to claims of sightings of supernatural beings in mundane objects. Mary in an oil stain, Jesus in the wood grain, angels in a window pane. I am of the strong feeling that these are random or semi-random patterns that our brains are desperately trying to make sense of.

Certainly there is no lack of examples. Just check out this very blog’s pareidolia category.

Still, that’s a jumble. Wouldn’t you rather have your Messiahtings (say it out loud) all arranged in a nice, neat ordered list?

Sure you do! So head over to The Shark Book blog, where they list the Top 11 Jesus Sightings. Now, I don’t necessarily agree with their choices on the list or the order (a shower sighting with no mention of Lenin?) but it’s still a good one and shows, all in one place, how some people really really want evidence of their faith, a process I have always found a little bit like cheating. If it’s faith, it doesn’t need proof. And if it’s real, then wouldn’t the evidence be a little bit better than a smudge in a pancake?^*

P.S. Yeah, I’ve seen the Jesus on the Ultrasound, too, and it cracks me up. It looks more like Nosferatu leaning over a victim. And there’s more than one ultrasound sighting, too.

The scifi blog io9 has an interesting idea: the next Trek series should focus on a grown-up Wesley Crusher who captains a starship that goes around the Alpha Quadrant solving mysteries (like how Janeway got a command, or why Worf always pops up anywhere in the galaxy he’s needed).

I actually think this isn’t a bad idea. Wesley was irritating, but he was written and directed that way. Wil is actually a fine actor and it would be cool to see him doing this. I suspect he wouldn’t be interested, to be honest, but since he does sometimes pop up in the comments here, we’ll see. Keep your eyes on his blog to see if he has anything to say.

And hmmm. He’d need a science/astronomy advisor…

P.S. Coincidentally, Gina Trapani at Lifehacker just wrote up a short piece about Wil.

Tip o’ the VISOR to Dave Hall for pointing this out… before I actually got to io9 in my feed reader today.

So while searching for something on Google, I found out about a movie called, simply, "Astronomy". Weirdly, IMDB’s synopsis doesn’t even mention astronomy itself, and it’s difficult to find any info on it given the popularity of the two obvious keywords. The movie sounds more like a melodrama than anything else. Anyone here in BABlogland seen it? Opinions?

In the maybe-next-time-you-should-actually-interview-people-before-hiring-them scenario, an English lecturer at Dartmouth went ballistic (link goes to the WSJ, ewww, sorry about that) when students questioned her suppositions.

Mind you, we’re only getting one side of the story, and that side is from the Wall Street Journal, which still thinks we’re being too easy on Iraq. Also, it opens with this anti-intellectualism line:

Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world.

Why do neocons hate smart people? Oh, I bet I can venture a guess.

Still and anyway, the story makes a good point. The lecturer appears to be something of a post-modern lunatic. The line of win is:

Ms. Venkatesan’s scholarly specialty is “science studies,” which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, “teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth.” She continues: “Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct.”

You can guess how I feel about that. Scientific facts do reflect natural reality. Of course they do! That’s what they are. I’d love to see her scientific background.

Maybe she can get a job with the Disco ‘tute, if they’re not already burgeoning to overflowing with Expelled teachers. But then, she chose to sue Dartmouth, and DI tends to cut and run when faced with actual lawsuits.

If anyone has any more info on this case, please feel free to link to it in the comments. I’d like to know more; she does sound nutty, but I have to also account for the source of this info.

And incidentally, I do get ragged on by commenters who think I am some sort of far-left liberal goofball, but perhaps they should save it for people who really are way over on the rive gauche.

Tip o’ the deconstructionist hegemonistic mortarboard to Fark. Typical childish taunts ensue in that link, duh, but some funny ones too.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is NASA’s next big mission to the Moon, and it will launch later this year. It carries an interesting suite of equipment: a camera that will have 50 cm resolution on the surface of the Moon (I’m hoping for Apollo rover shots!), a laser altimeter for mapping the lunar topology, a radiation detector to map out the radiation environment of the Moon, and more.

But there’s something else it can carry as well: your name. NASA is putting a microchip onboard LRO that will contain the names of anyone who submits them. Send them your own, or a relative, or someone you’re trying to impress.

I actually think this is a cute idea. It doesn’t hurt the mission, doesn’t add any real mass, but it can help inspire people about space travel and give them a sense of ownership. They even have a cute video about it (here’s the direct link).

Of course, it’s open to abuse as well…

Paranal is a 2600 meter-high mountain in Chile, and the location of the very large Very Large Telescope telescope^*, an 8-meter monster that is one of the largest in the world. It creates amazing pictures of the heavens, as you might expect.

But you don’t always need a telescope to see jaw-dropping beauty. The folks at the European Southern Observatory just released some really nice shots taken outside the dome. Here’s one of the setting Sun:

The blue flash is the even more rare cousin of the unusual green flash. Basically, the light from the setting Sun is bent by the Earth’s air. But the Earth is curved, so the closer an object is to the horizon, the more air it must pass through. Also, different colors of light are bent differently by air; the shorter wavelengths (violet, blue, green) are bent more then longer (yellow, orange, red), and these effects add up to generate a transient but very pretty flash of color. The circumstances needed for a flash are particular, so they don’t happen terribly often.

The ESO released other images, including a green flash and spectacular shots of the gegenschein and zodiacal light: sunlight reflected back to us from dust particles in space. These are phenomenally difficult to see or photograph, so the pictures are particularly noteworthy and very, very pretty.

Someday I’d like to get to a site so dark I could see that for my own self. Wow.

Pictures like this are so cool: they remind us that there are things out there you’ve probably never even heard of, yet are incredibly beautiful and just waiting to be seen. All you have to do is want to know about them.