Hmmm, this is clever and well-done. Smarter than anything a Moon hoax believer ever produced (of course, the bar is set pretty low; the high point being Sibrel getting himself punched in the face by Buzz Aldrin). Too bad the excerpted frame ruins the joke though!

This picture of a crater from Mercury came out a little while ago, but I’ve been busy. Better late than never. Check it:

What do we make of this?

1) Mercury is copyrighted. Everyone says Mercury looks like the Moon, but the Moon is actually several hundred million years younger than Mercury. This means the Moon is in violation of the law.

2) Some say this looks like a telephone in the crater, but that’s silly. Who has a phone that looks like this any more?

3) Ralph Rene and Bart Sibrel are right (scroll down a little bit to "Note R").

4) The feature is actually a U, not a C, and therefore Mercury is kosher.

5) It’s an angel. Hey, it looks as much like one as this does.

What do you see? I mean, what do you C?

I’m not exactly a wishy-washy kind of guy, but choosing this year’s Top Ten Astronomy pictures was really tough. First, there are literally hundreds of images to go through. Maybe thousands. I can usually narrow that choice down to a few dozen. But then I’ll have three pictures of the same sort of thing: colliding galaxies, or Jupiter’s moons, or whatever. Then I have to figure which of those three is the best. Framing, color, science, simple devastating impact… whatever criteria I can use. Then I have to make sure I can use the one I pick. Some images are from amateur astronomers, and I need to know if they are copyrighted, and what credit to give.

For whatever reason, some images just didn’t make the cut. I never heard back from the owner, the image wasn’t high enough resolution, whatever. In some cases they were too similar to last year’s picks (I may ease up on that next time). For others, I just screwed up; I thought they were from 2006, or I simply never saw the image in the first place.

The following pictures are one that fall in this category. They are all gorgeous, of course, and very cool scientifically, but they just didn’t make my Top Ten. Still, I think you’ll like them! Clicking on them will take you to a high-resolution version from the original image site. Some are extremely high-res and totally amazing.

Crescent Saturn

After I had compiled my final Top Ten list and written everything up, I realized with utter horror (no exaggeration) that not one Cassini image was on the list! And this, with a) the Saturn image being my #1 pick last year, and b) Carolyn Porco — the Cassini imaging team leader — being a friend of mine! The reason I left Saturn off were manyfold, and I tried, oh I tried. Here are the pictures I considered.

This spectacular Cassini image of the crescent Saturn is impossible to see from Earth; the orbiter was high over the plane of the rings, capturing this mesmerizing view. I love this picture, and was one of my first choices for the Top Ten. But then I realized it was a little too much like last year’s winner, so I cut it. That hurt to do.

Iapetus

Saturn’s moons are weird, but none weirder than Iapetus. First, it has two totally different hemispheres; the leading gone (the one that faces into its direction of travel as it orbits the ringed planet) is very dark, and the trailing hemisphere is very bright. This is because of the junk it slams into as it moves around Saturn. Also, the moon has a giant raised ridge around its equator, kilometers high. Theories abound about it (including some silly pseudoscience ones, of course), but its exact origin is still something of a mystery. This picture is a mosaic of several smaller images made by Cassini. I didn’t include it on my list because I’m an idiot, and thought it was from 2006 (even though it was on my blog recently)! It was Fraser from Universe Today who told me (too late) that it was recent. Figures. Obviously, this would have made the cut had I been thinking.

Kaboom!

In February, a rocket booster exploded high in the sky over Australia. Robert McNaught, famed comet hunter, caught it on camera and created a short animation as the debris cloud moved across the sky as it orbited the Earth. You just don’t see stuff like this every day, and it’s totally cool. You can even see small streaks from the solid debris! This image is from Space Weather, which is a great daily stop for amazing images and info.

Comet McNaught from STEREO

Speaking of McNaught…

Comet McNaught graced our skies in January 2007, and was magnificent. It was near the Sun, and so bright it was easily visible in broad daylight! I took many terrible pictures of it, but my favorite is this one from NASA’s STEREO spacecraft. Thing is, I already had a STEREO animation on my Top Ten list, and another comet as well, so I dropped this one. There are dozens, hundreds of incredible images of McNaught on the web; my second favorite is this one from McNaught, the man himself. APOD has many more, too.

The Moon Eats Saturn

I love this multiple image of Saturn passing behind the Moon. It comes from Peter Lawrence via LPOD, the Lunar Picture of the Day. It’s rare, but sometimes the Moon appears to pass directly in front of a planet. Peter took a series of images and made this composite. It’s very cool, and gives you a sense of depth to the solar system. Saturn is huge, but it’s a long way away.

How many Hubble images can you have in a Top Ten list? Maybe next year I’ll expand the list to 15. That way I won’t have to leave out pictures like this one, of the galaxy cluster Abell S0740. Pictures like this floor me; the sheer variety, complexity, and beauty of galaxies in a cluster always brings me to a standstill. Just examining the image can tell you so much about galaxies behave in such an environment! Careful analysis also reveals a lot of information about the way the Universe itself behaves, and that’s why we do this, isn’t it? That, and to simply gape at the pageantry of the cosmos.

Carina

The Milky Way Galaxy is lousy with dense clouds of gas and dust, stellar nurseries where stars are born. This phenomenal Hubble mosaic has so much going on in it that it’s hard to know where to start, and it’s harder to know where to stop! That link will take you to a lengthy description I wrote, and had a huge amount of fun putting together. Scroll to the bottom for one of my favorite astronomical images of all time.

Barred for Life

I don’t need to give too many reasons for loving this image of barred spiral NGC 1672, taken by Hubble. I just love spirals, and barred spirals too. Love love love. Sigh.

I Zwicky 18

… or this picture of I Zwicky 18. This galaxy is cool for more than just its odd beauty: it was thought to be a young galaxy, but it turns out to have some very old stars in it. It is also 59 million light years away; the observations making this image showed it to be 10 million light years farther away than previously thought.

HAWK-1 and the Stellar Cocoon

This image from the Very Large Telescope in Chile is very cool, showing dust and gas in a star-forming region. I discussed it in depth in an earlier blog entry. It’s nice, but not quite what I was looking for for my Top Ten. Still… cool.

I love whimsical pictures, too, and this one kills me. The effort that went into it must have been phenomenal; the Moon is actually very small in a camera, and I would think that if the tripod had even been bumped slightly it would have totally screwed this image up. Not to mention the timing! Wow.

Spitzer maps a distant planet

In 1995, the first planet was discovered orbiting a sun-like star. We’ve come a long way: well over 200 have now been found; one has been directly imaged, and some have even had their atmosphere detected! This image is the very first temperature map ever made of an exoplanet, in this case HD 189733b, which orbits its star so closely that it is extremely hot. Spitzer can detect that heat, and as the planet orbits its star we see different aspects of it. By mapping the amount of heat detected very carefully over time, astronomers were able to create this temperature map of the planet. The hot spot is the part of the planet that permanently faces the star (where it’s always high noon), and fierce winds distribute that heat around the rest of the planet.

Mapping Dark Matter

It is no exaggeration to say that this is one of the most important maps ever made: a three-dimensional layout of dark matter in the Universe. Dark matter is invisible, but for decades has been known to exist. An extraordinary series of observations led to astronomers being able to map out its location in the Universe. Distance increases to the right, and, since we see more distant objects as they were in the past, we are actually getting a timeline of the cosmos. Note how the dark matter is smoother back when the Universe was young; over billions of years it has fragmented and aided the development of the galaxies and clusters we see today. This was an incredible confirmation of dark matter science and theory!

Spitzer Helix

The Helix Nebula is a favorite: it’s a planetary nebula, a cloud of gas created when a dying star sheds its outer layers, which expand outward in dramatic fashion. Spitzer Space Telescope captured this incredible view of it. It’s possible the Sun will look like this in a few billion years, when it runs out of hydrogen fuel in its core and starts its final paroxysms… though some current reading I have done indicates the Sun won’t be bright enough to light up the gas. It will still blow off its envelope, but the gas won’t be lit up in this way. Too bad, I suppose; aliens viewing our eventual demise won’t get such a pretty show.

Earthrise, Earthset

The US and Russia are no longer the only countries to have sent probes to the Moon, Japan now belongs to this exclusive club (as do India and China as well). The Japanese orbiter Kaguya captured this incredible series of images as the Earth appeared to set over the limb of the Moon. It doesn’t look real! But don’t tell Bart Sibrel.

Home

Does this count as astronomy? Maybe. But after traveling millions of light years across the Universe, sometimes the best sight of all is the approach of home.

And there you go. Next year, well, we’ll see. Making the Top Ten cut is so hard I may very well expand the list. If you are an amateur astronomer — or a pro — better get cracking! Obviously, the competition is fierce. But I’m already looking forward to seeing what will rise over the horizon in 2008.

I have some follow-up on my Moon Hoax talk in Redding, California last week.

First, there’s a thread on BAUT about it, which includes picture goodness from BABloggee Sabrina.

Second, Bruce Ross from Redding.com wrote an editorial about the talk the day after (I should have known he was a reporter; he was the only one there wearing a tie). He has nice things to say, which is cool… but he includes a funny bit from someone who was less than thrilled with my cold dose of reality:

Last night at the David Marr Auditorium, Phil Plait presented “science” as stand-up comedy with sarcasm, rhetorical comments and witticisms. He skewered other legitimate investigators and got chuckles from the innocent people in the audience – mostly members of the Turtle Bay Museum. What I observed was organized propaganda and centralized information.

How is it possible that in 2001 the FOX TV channel televised a believable program examining the unanswered questions surrounding the so-called moon landings and yet, today in 2007, FOX is clearly the Bush administration’s mouthpiece? Why has the government sent a representative out to local communities to debunk “the moon hoax hoax” when most people have not even heard of the “moon hoax”?

Just my thoughts…

I’m always amazed what people are capable of thinking. Calling Bart Sibrel and his ilk "legitimate investigators" is really, really funny. Maybe he missed the part where I went into detail about Bart’s ambushing of Buzz Aldrin and other astronauts to get them to swear on a Bible that they walked on the moon (I bet Walter Cronkite is green with envy over Bart’s investigatory acumen), or how so many Moon Hoax conspiracy theorists claim to be experts at photography but don’t understand anything about film, cameras, exposure times, framing, aperture settings, reflections, perspective, shadows… all those tiny tiny details.

As for my being organized, well, yeah. But propaganda? Funny, but what I presented were not only facts, but reproduceable experiments you can do at home (I modeled a moving flag by blowing on my belt, then swinging it back and forth: some propaganda!). The "centralized information" line has me a bit baffled, too. Does he mean evidence-based reasoning using facts, scientific protocols, and logical analysis? Color me guilty!

Oh well, you can’t please everybody, and, of course, you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.

I was fooling around on You Tube doing a vanity search, and I was surprised to see that someone had uploaded the "debate" I had with Moon hoax goofball Bart Sibrel which aired on MSNBC back in 2002. This was the first time I had ever gone head-to-head with a conspiracy theorist, and I don’t think my performance was 100% up to snuff. The format was awful; Dan Abrams’ show gave way too much time to setup and also way too much time to Sibrel. But I blew it on a few fronts here; the worst being that I didn’t lead the discussion, I took my cues from the host. I should have taken control right away and steered the conversation more toward Sibrel’s claims, which were ludicrous. Also, I looked like I was clenching my teeth the whole time. I need to smile more on camera.

This is one reason I don’t debate antiscientists very much; the format on radio and TV makes it very difficult. I held my own against Joe Rogan, for example, but that hold was tenuous during quite a bit of the second segment.

Here’s the MSNBC video.

One good thing came out of this: Sibrel claims I am a NASA employee and "that’s where [I] get my paychecks." That is not true, of course: I’ve never been a NASA employee, and that is something Sibrel should have known before he said that. Either he didn’t know and was making that up, or he did know and said it anyway. Either way, it’s a lie, and so I can honestly, and with evidence, call Bart Sibrel a liar!

There was a lively discussion of this on the bulletin board when the show originally aired, too.

Note: the thread was converted to the new board software a while back, and some of the content didn’t convert correctly, so you’ll see some weird stuff there (links to images and such).

Oh cripes, am I tired.

I got a nice night’s sleep, the first in a week or so. So that was cool. There’s a Starbucks in the hotel, so I got (barely) decent coffee, and a chocolate muffin that had perhaps 37 ounces of oil in it, but was yummy. I made my way to the conference, and I missed a talk I wanted to see, but was able to get into Seth Shostak’s talk. Seth is an old friend, and astronomer who works on SETI (and who does the Are We Alone radio show on which I do the Brains on Vacation segment), and he gave a talk on when we’ll detect aliens for the first time (summary: about 20 years from now if they exist, and his numbers are pretty convincing). Seth is an excellent speaker, and if you need a speaker for an event you should contact him. He was really funny, and had the audience laughing quite a bit.

My Moon hoax talk was at 12:30, and there were a couple of tech glitches but nothing major (I’ve had major before, so anything short of that is good). It went well, though a little long (shocker) and the audience clearly had fun. They were Apollo fans! So they were a great group. I went to the exhibit hall to sign copies of my (increasingly aged) book, and got lots of questions which is always fun.

At the other end of the exhibit hall were the astronauts! So I went over and mostly just listened to them talk to their fans, and I must say, it was very cool. These are great guys who did incredible things, and the stories are fantastic. I chatted with Rusty Schweickart (Apollo 9) about preventing asteroids from hitting the Earth, a topic he is an expert on. I was surprised to learn that moving some asteroids out of the way can be very easy — Apophis, which may hit us in 2036, can be moved out of harm’s way by adding millimeters per hour to its velocity! That can be achieved practically by blowing on it. I will definitely be reading (and writing) more on this.

I also chatted briefly with lots of others: Jack Lousma, Walt Cunningham, Charlie Duke again, Ed Mitchell (Ed literally kicked Bart Sibrel out of his house, bless his heart). I hung out by Buzz Aldrin’s table and listened to him regale Carolyn Porco with stories about a novel he wrote, and we were eating it up.

I hooked up with some folks for dinner, and then afterwards spent about two hours at the hotel bar swapping stories.

It was fun. I mean, it was fun. I miss being able to do this! It’s been a while.

The best part: I have all day tomorrow, and part of Sunday here too. Cool. And even better: in two weeks I’m going on a cruise with James Randi and some skeptics to Alaska (you’d better believe I’ll be posting about that while it happens, too).

I have some fun pix, but I’m too tired to work on them now. Beddiebye time for me. I’ll post them tomorrow when I get a chance.

OK, not really (and here’s the reference). But he’s trying to set up a lottery, and the winner gets a ticket to ride… to space. Details are sketchy, but my guess is this won’t be active for a few more years yet. But there’s no doubt he’ll still get quite a few takers. Better get in line now!

I wonder if Bart Sibrel will buy a ticket?