October 7, 2009
As you may have noticed, there's a new super-high resolution mosaic of the planet Mercury that's available.
How high resolution is it? Perhaps you should join me on my journey as I zoom in to the upper left hand corner. (Click each image to view it full-size.)
While Mercury may look unevenly…
October 6, 2009
You're sweet as a honey bee
But like a honey bee stings
You've gone and left my heart in pain
All you left is our favorite song
The one we danced to all night long
It used to bring sweet memories
Of a tender love that used to be
Now it's the same old song
But with a different meaning
Since you been…
October 5, 2009
Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, never really has had a great picture taken of it. There are a number of reasons for this, such as:
It never gets more than 28 degrees away from the Sun, meaning we get two hours after sunset -- max -- to look at it.
Because the sky is still light, it's very…
October 5, 2009
Though my soul may set in darkness,
It will rise in perfect light,
I have loved the stars too fondly
To be fearful of the night. --Sarah Williams
Everyone knows how you see things during the day: sunlight makes it possible. Delivering huge amounts of visible light to the entire "day" side of the…
October 3, 2009
Where else would you find a combination of Avenue Q and Sesame Street?
(Caution: adult themes in the very, very amusing video below.)
Because we all need something light once in a while. Hope you have a great weekend!
October 2, 2009
When I was a kid, Mercury and Pluto were the bookends of our Solar System. The two smallest planets, one of them was distant, icy, and raw, and the other was close in, speedy, and overcooked. One of them had the New Horizons mission planned for it, and the other had the Messenger mission.
Only one…
September 30, 2009
Many of you saw the pictures I posted Monday of colliding galaxy clusters. These pictures were spectacular, because they not only show galaxy clusters less than 200 million years after a collision (which is short, cosmically), they also show where the mass lies (traced in blue) and where the X-ray…
September 29, 2009
As many of you know, light pollution at night has become a big problem. It's a problem for flora and fauna, which rely on the "day/night" cycle that they've adapted to over billions of years, and it's a problem for astronomers, as the light pollution disrupts observations of the night sky. All over…
September 28, 2009
Deep into the darkness peering,
long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
-Edgar Allen Poe, The Raven
Gazing out into the dark abyss of the night sky, stars, galaxies, and clusters shine like tiny islands of light against the blackness…
September 27, 2009
I've liked the musician Rufus Wainwright for some time, but I didn't realize that he was the son of Loudon Wainwright, whom I've just recently discovered. Loudon's a singer/songwriter who's been around for even longer, and who I like even better than Rufus. His song Father and Son was written for…
September 25, 2009
The Milky Way is a mysterious swath of darkness and light through the night sky. In places where light pollution is low enough to see it, its beauty is unmistakable.
Well, the above image is what you might see with your naked eye. But even a small telescope can get you so much more. The darkest…
September 24, 2009
When I was first learning about the science of the Moon, there were a few basic facts that everyone got right. The Moon has practically no atmosphere, as when sunlight hits the Moon, it very quickly can give individual molecules and atoms enough energy to achieve escape velocity. We thought the…
September 23, 2009
Long you live and high you fly
Smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry
All you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be. -Pink Floyd
In part I of this series, we talked about a number of different ways -- all using gravity -- to measure the amount of matter in galaxies, clusters of…
September 22, 2009
Gravitational lensing happens when a cluster of galaxies happens to be directly between us and an even more distant galaxy. The light from these distant galaxies gets warped into arcs and, oftentimes, multiple images. This shot from the new Hubble camera shows exactly what I'm talking about:
Well…
September 21, 2009
There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking. -Alfred Korzybski
I've recently received a number of messages from readers of this site expressing doubts about the existence of dark matter. As someone who's researched…
September 19, 2009
I've got to say, I get some weird things in my head sometimes. I don't know how many of you know who Vashti Bunyan is, but you may have heard a snippet from one of her songs last year in an NFL commercial. The beautiful, haunting song is called Train Song and it was the first song I thought of…
September 18, 2009
Before you ask yourself, "what kind of incendiary title is that," let me put this in perspective. In 2001, I started graduate school at the University of Florida, and in 2002, I took one of the most difficult year-long courses a physics student can take: Quantum Field Theory. This was both the best…
September 17, 2009
Andromeda, also known as M31, is the nearest large galaxy to us. At "only" 2 million light-years away, it gives us the best chance to study another spiral galaxy besides our own. I get particularly impressed by the high resolution images we can get, since it's so close to us. Andromeda looks like…
September 16, 2009
No, not you personally. But if you've ever thought about sending anything up into space, you may want to listen to this story about a couple of MIT students. For less than $150 in parts, with an amazing ease of assembly, they managed to send a device up to the brink of space, take some pictures,…
September 15, 2009
Yesterday, I read something in international news that made me so mad I needed to share it with you:
That's right; my home country, the United States, will not distribute this film. There was no problem for the movie Expelled, a poorly argued anti-evolution flop that grossed just $7,598,071…
September 14, 2009
Last week, we got a chance to talk about why the sky is red toward sunset and sunrise but blue everywhere else: the atmosphere. Red light passes through the atmosphere pretty well, but blue light gets scattered more easily. When you look to the horizon at sunset/sunrise, the light passes through a…
September 12, 2009
Like to go to the movies? Like movie theatre popcorn/candy/slushies/etc.? And do you also like surreal humor?
Take a listen and look at Mastodon's "Cut you up with a Linoleum Knife". It isn't the normal music I listen to, but it's one of my favorite movie openings ever.
But this totally amuses me…
September 11, 2009
Perhaps my favorite of the new Hubble pictures is this one of Stephan's Quintet (and click here for the 1000 pixel wide version):
It's so stunning that it was chosen as today's Astronomy Picture of the Day. But yesterday, I got a very interesting question to go along with it:
These galaxies are…
September 10, 2009
Yesterday, I linked to the Hubble Site, where they've got a collection of stunning new images taken using Hubble's new camera, the Wide-Field Camera 3:
But why would you bother to go there? After all, you know that I'll just show you all the gorgeousness here! Hubble is an astounding telescope,…
September 9, 2009
Remember saying goodbye to Hubble's old camera, WFPC2? This servicing mission was months ago, now, so perhaps you've forgotten about this 19 year old telescope.
Well, the new camera, WFC3, is finally ready to make its debut. Plans include surveying the Kuiper Belt, looking at newly forming planets…
September 8, 2009
Sure, we're all familiar with sunsets, and how they appear to turn the entire sky close to the horizon red at night.
But it turns out it isn't just the Sun, and it isn't just the sky. If you look at the Moon at either Moonrise or Moonset, guess what color it appears to be? (Even in urban settings…
September 7, 2009
One nice new feature we've got here on scienceblogs is the Editor's Picks feature, found on the front page. While browsing it this weekend, I was drawn to this provocative article. In it, Benjamin Cohen writes of his interview with Rebecca Solnit, who says the following when asked about nuclear…
September 6, 2009
It's something we take for granted in our modern, civilized world, but a really severe winter brings a lot of challenges with it. Dar Williams, in her song February, sings a beautiful piece about living through the worst of it:
Some places have it far worse than others. For instance, in many…
September 4, 2009
Electric charges come in two types, positive and negative. Magnetic poles also come in two types, North and South. In both cases, like charges/poles repel, and opposites attract. The big difference? Electric charges can exist in isolation; you can have just a positive or negative charge by itself.…
September 3, 2009
One of the things I always wondered was why Galileo's Eppur si muove! (And yet, it moves!) was such a big deal. Yes, he was talking about heliocentricity, and the Earth moving around the Sun instead of the other way around.
But I was a little bit puzzled. Why, after all, would the Earth moving be…
