Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Happy birthday Neptune


That's the headline you're reading a lot but, really, that's not entirely accurate. It's more of "New Year" celebration.

Specifically, July 12 marked the completion of one Neptunian revolution around the sun since its discovery in 1846. Here is a great video that shows how much history has occurred in the 165 Earth years since its discovery!

Of course, part of that history includes an actual robotic visit to the planet by Voyager 2 in August of 1989. We saw an amazingly cold planet, circled by a moon that traveled in a backward direction. The smallest amount of heat influences some of the most extreme weather in the solar system!

Neptune is muddling around in the constellations of Capricornus and Aquarius. And, when it gets high enough, in a telescope it will be..well..underwhelming. But, the chance to see a planet a couple of billion kilometers away is worth it. Awesome!

Clear skies!

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Dawn approaching

Dawn is fast approaching!

That's the NASA Dawn probe to the asteroids Vesta and Ceres with it's first stop at the brightest asteroid Vesta. At present, it's about 100,000 kms from Vesta and closing fast for it's July 16 rendezvous! At last, I and the rest of humanity are going to get an up-close-and-personal view of one of the asteroid belt's biggest denizens, rather than just a dot of light in the eyepiece of a telescope!

Not that we don't know what asteroids look like. In fact, about a dozen asteroids have either had close-up encounters with Earth-based technology or, at the very least, been viewed from a distance by them. Near Earth objects Eros and Itokawa have even been orbited by them. But Vesta is a unique one. It's a remnant of a remarkable time in the solar system's history when the planetary gallery resembled something more like a raucous rave party than the stately gathering we have today.

Imagine back about 4.3 billion years ago. The solar nebula had collapsed and bodies from the size of peas to objects as big and bigger than the planets we have today were still settling into their orbits. Indeed, many astronomers suspect we had many times the planets we have now, all jostling for position. The worlds of our current solar system were simply the winners of a titanic battle of bulk, gravity, time and even dumb luck!

Some of that "raw material" remains in the form of asteroids and comets. So getting a close look at these tiny bits of cosmic flotsam could give us profound insights into the early history and evolution of our solar system.

Vesta and Ceres represent the largest members of this population of bits and pieces. They're big enough that mass and gravity have acted to turn them into roughly spherical shapes. However, they're still too small to be considered planets, giving astronomers a challenge to understand them in the grand scheme of the solar system.

As Dawn has approached Vesta, the image of this 500 kilometer-sized body has swelled in size and detail. And the amount of detail they will gather will be even further increased by the fact that, over the next year, Dawn will orbit Vesta before departing for an encounter with even larger "protoplanet" Ceres.

For myself, Vesta holds a special place in my heart as the first asteroid I've ever caught sight of. They're difficult objects to spot and track and finding one gives one an appreciation for the challenge of discovery they represent. They are tiny dots of light that move slowly against the background stars. Hard to believe that, at one time, they were considered "vermin" of the solar system, introducing unwelcome streaks to long-duration photos of objects.

Now, they represent one of the greatest mysteries of modern science - how the solar system came to be.

So tune in, folks. With the approach of Dawn comes a whole new day of astronomical discovery!

Clear skies!

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Golden rings in the night

Jupiter's gone behind the sun, Venus is sinking from prominence in the morning sky. Oh, what could there possibly be worth to look at in the spring evening skies?

Hmmm...I don't know. How about this!

Well, not all of us can image planets like a Donald Parker or Christopher Go but so what!? Even a modest telescope will show you Saturn's rings and a larger telescope will bring out all kinds of details that are just, well, stunning! Throw in its own retinue of visible moons - Tethys, Dione, Titan, Rhea, Iapetus and even Enceladus from time to time! - and you've got an evening not easily forgotten!

I could tell you all kinds of things scientific about Saturn, but that information is available courtesy of NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. So instead, let me just tell you that, if you want to find it, it's in the ecliptic constellation of Virgo, not too far from the wonderful double star Porrima.

Oh, and I'm also posting an image I've taken of Saturn in the past. Yeah, I know, not as good as a Don Park or Chris Go, but still...!

Clear skies!

Friday, February 4, 2011

Paddling against the tide

Well, how could I resist this!?

Doing the rounds of the Internet and suffering the barbs of media mockers like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert is a bit of video of Fox talking head and bombast extraordinaire Bill O'Reilly vs. the atheist.

Of course, Bill gave us a great example of the logical fallacy: argument from incredulity (or argument from ignorance) or a "God of the gaps." Pose a question which you insist there is no answer and propose that as the evidence for supernatural agency.

In this case, it was the tides. "They go in, they go out. You can't explain it," he challenges the atheist. The problem is, most of us with junior high school level of education can as was pointed out by a viewer in his YouTube response.

"You pinheads who attacked me? You're just desperate." Well, Bill, we're not the one's flailing around to defend a clear foul-up of logic. He even goes so far as to pose a series of other seemingly God-proving questions like "How did the moon get there?" "How come we have the sun?" "Why doesn't Mars have (a moon)? Or Venus?"

Well, as has been pointed out, Mars has two small moons. Venus doesn't but so what? Objects called nebulae in the night sky have been shown to be forming stars and planets. And how does any of that prove the existence of God?

Of course, it doesn't disprove "God's" existence. But it also doesn't prove or disprove the existence of unicorns, fairies, Thor, Zeus or the great Flying Spaghetti Monster and his sacred son Googamooga!

The irony of it all is that someone can display such ignorance of basic science using a medium that is the direct products of science and which makes scientific knowledge so accessible.

Perhaps Bill should make better use of that technology.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Sidesteppin' astrology

Surprise, surprise! The big "shift" is underway!

I have to admit, this one took me a bit by surprise. Turns out that Earth's precession is necessitating a reshuffling of the astrology charts. So if you're a "creative and sensitive" Virgo, you might be about to become a "deep and imaginative" Libran.

Or not.

Now, I've been pretty straightforward in my views on astrology. In two words: it's nonsense! And, in fact, I've been thinking of doing a blog on astrology for a while now. Here's my chance. Let's lay it out for everyone here.

First of all, there is not one type of "astrology." In fact, there's many different forms of astrology. But they all attempt to accomplish the same thing: tie the affairs of tiny humans to the movements of the stars and planets. Where a planet or the sun or the moon sits in a particular part of the sky determines your "fate."

Let's really look at this for a second. The Milky Way galaxy has been around for about 13 billion years. The solar system for 4.5 billion. And we humans have been around for about 2 million years. So what did the universe do without us all that time? Did it wait for us to come along, just so it could start determining fates? I suspect otherwise.

And that's the core of my issues with the concept of astrology. It seeks to place humans at the core of creation. I thought we were past that nonsense with the insights of Copernicus and Galileo.

Also, like a lot of "magical" thinking, it requires the belief that distance has no impact on the effects. For instance, Venus comes closer to Earth than any other planet in the solar system. It's possible to see its disk withe the naked eye. However, Pluto (argued by astronomers over whether it is or not a planet) also has an effect, even though it's so far away, it's light takes four hours to reach us!

Then there's the selectiveness of it. Why just the nine classic planets (again, nine if you count Pluto...which I do)? Why not Ceres? Or Vesta? Or Chiron? All these bodies are large enough to have pulled themselves into spherical shapes. Why would they not have an effect on the fates of individual people?

But, like a lot of this sort of thinking, it boils down I think to not just individual but collective vanity - the belief that we are the end point of a universe's evolution instead of just a single point of a much larger, complex system.

It's a big universe that existed a long time before we ever came along. It will be here a long time after we're gone both individually and as a species. And in the time we've been here, through science, we've discovered that the universe is an amazing place all on its own.

To quote Douglas Adams, "Isn't it enough to see that the garden is beautiful without having to believe there's fairies at the bottom of it?"

Clear skies.