Hubble Rises From the Ashes as Phoenix Fades

The Hubble Space Telescope is back working! And just to strut it’s stuff check out its first image.

This pair of galaxies is known as Arp 147 (from Halton Arp’s list of peculiar galaxies) and has been dubbed the Perfect 10. The galaxy on the left seems to have just plowed through the middle of the galaxy on the right setting off a round of star formation (massive young stars tend to be nice and blue like you see in the ring).

On a sad note, the Phoenix Mars Lander entered safe mode due to low power. It is heading toward winter in the northern hemisphere on Mars and the lander is getting less power (possibly compounded by dust building up on the soalr panels).   They are shutting down various heaters on it and other instruments to save power and keep it going as long as possible.  We knew this was coming.  Soon the Sun will set for the long winter.  Snow will probably build up on the solar panels and break them so no one really expects it to wake up again in the spring.  It has been a good mission, achieved all its goals and a few bonuses, and has lasted longer than its original 90 day mission.

Phoenix has served us well.

The Chesire Cat Gravitational Lens

I just found this gravitational lens from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey which has been dubbed the Chesire Cat.

Hopefully you can see the eyes and the smile near the center of the image.

The two eyes of the cat are two massive elliptical galaxies about 4.5 billion light years away.  These galaxies are bending and distorting the light of more distant galaxies (at least two different galaxies have been identified) to form the smile.  These more distant galaxies are about 8 billion light years away.

Gravitational lensing is one of those weird things predicted by Einstein.  He said that a massive object (say a galaxy) could warp space.  Light from a more distant object would follow this strangely curved space time and creates all kinds of interesting patterns such as arcs, crosses and circles.

Gravitational lenses are useful for mapping dark matter.  By looking at the pattern we see, we can calculate how much matter is present and how it is distributed.  We can also look at the matter we see and conclude that what we don’t see is, well, dark matter!

You can see the Chesire Cat and a bunch of other gravitaitonal lenses from the SDSS at at the CASSOWARY Graviational Lenss page.

Death From the Podcasts

Last week I blogged about my friend Phil Plait and his new book Death From the Skies. It turns out he is doing a virtual book tour and you can join him.

First stip is an interview with my friend Pamela Gay at Astronomy Cast. You can hear him talk a lot about the topics in the books. This podcast is free to download or you can listen streaming.

Next stop is an interview on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe.  This one is in my mp3 player now, waiting to be listened to.  I have been listening to this podcast for a while so I have no problem giving it the recommendation.

Some people say they will wait for the movie of the book…now I guess we wait for the podcast!

The Big Picture: Enceladus

The Boston Globe’s Big Picture is spectacular this week, featuring Saturn’s Moon Ecneladus as seen by the Cassini spacecraft. Here is my favorite.

Okay, there are actually three objects in this picture. First you will notice an edge on view of Saturn’s rings.  The big dark circle with a ring of light is Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.  Titan has a thick atmosphere that scatters sunlight making that distinctive ring.  Then you will see the small dark moon Enceladus about 2 O’clock on the ring of light around Titan.  Since we see the Sun eclipsed, we are looking at the night side of both of the Moons.

Be sure to check out the entire collection of pictures.

Have a Frankenbeer for Long Life

We have a thing about those French, right? They eat lousy diets but are healthier than we are. One idea about why is because they drink a lot of wine that is high in resveratrol. The University of Wisconsin recently published a study on the effects of resveratrol.

Well, we Americans don’t want to drink no stinkin’ wine…we are beer drinkers! So a group of students at Rice University set about finding a solution: a genetically modified strain of yeast that will produce resveratrol! Unfortunately, these are geeky students, not beer brewers and their first batch reportedly wasn’t exactly a fine beer. But they are turning to Saint Arnold Brewing Company to get it right.

Soon we too will be able to eat poorly, drink beer, and still live a long, healthy life thanks to the geeks!

Oh, and that is another bottle of geeky beer: Galileo’s Ale that was introduces at last summer’s American Astronomical Society meeting.

India’s First Lunar Mission

India launched its first lunar mission today, Chandrayaan-1 (which means “Moon craft” in Sanskrit, and I am not going to write that again for fear of misspelling).  This mission will map almost the entire lunar surface with a resolution of about 5 meters and keep up the search for water in the polar regions.  A 5 meter resolution is pretty good…you could see a house, but not something the size of a person.  (The U.S. will launch the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter next year which will have much higher resolution but will not be able to image the entire surface of the Moon so these two missions complement each other nicely).

Congratulations to India…and best of luck in the futrue.  They are planning a lander/rover mission for 2011!

The Great Worldwide Star Count

Monday night starts the Great Worldwide Star Count, a project to raise awareness of light pollution as well as collect a little data.  The basic idea is simple.  People around the world go out at night and look up at the constellation Cygnus (in the norhtern hemisphere) or Saggitarius (in the southern hemisphere).  You compare what you see to the star charts on the web site and you have an estimate of how much light pollution there is in your neighborhood.  You enter your observation into a form on the web site (along with your location) and you have just contributed a little bit to science. You can even make multiple observations from different locations.  The most useful data is when a single city has data points near the center, the edge, and points in between.

Bad lighting design does more than just drown out the stars.  Bad lighting design wastes energy by letting it go upward and can even create lots of bright glare and dark shadows that can decrease safety.  Light pollution has many well known adverse effects on wildlife and even has been shown to increase cancer rates.

The International Dark Sky Association is the great resource for information on light pollution including sources for good lighting design and how to work with your local government addressing the issue.

The Great Worldwide Star Count begins on October 20th and runs through November 3rd.  So go out and make some obsevations!

Stay Alive With “Stayin’ Alive”

A study from the University of Illinois College of Medicine has shown that the song “Stayin’ Alive” helps people perform CPR correctly.  It is recommended that you give 100 chest compressions per minute when doing CPR, very close to the 103 beats per minute of “Stayin’ Alive”.  There are other songs that have close to 100 beats per minute, but few probably known as universally in the U.S. as “Stayin’ Alive.”

And everyone should know CPR.  So everyone go out, put on your platform shoes and get to the local Red Cross or American Heart Association class and get certified so you an save a life.

McCain Suddenly Doesn’t Like the DMCA (and Rightly So!)

According to an article on Cnet, the McCain campaign is protesting YouTube’s take down policy.  They claim several of McCain’s ads have been removed from YouTube due to Digital Millennium Copywright Act take down notices being filed.  The McCain campaign says the material in question is covered by fair use.  He may be right (although the letter to YouTube does not list specific examples).

The problem is the DMCA is pretty draconian.  If a content provider such as YouTube takes down a video when they are notified of infringement, they are not held liable for damages.  If they left it up (as the McCain campaign is suggesting) they could be sued.  So places like YouTube do the safe thing and take it down.  YouTube has fired off a response to the McCain campaign according to Wired suggesting he (or Obama) introduce legislation to amdend the DMCA.  Our current Congress and Senate aren’t helping as they just passed a new anti-piracy law upping the penalties for infringement that was signed by Bush on Monday (bet you didn’t hear about that one in the news!)

McCain has proposed YouTube handle political ads differently and review them for fair use before taking them down.  That is totally missing the point.  The DMCA tramples on EVERYONE’S fair use rights, not just those of political campaigns.  What McCain (and Obama) should do is stand up and tell everyone the DMCA needs revision to protect fair use and pledge to pursue such changes in their administration.  As bloggers, we should all be supporting DMCA reform.

On the Shoulders of Giants

I just downloaded and listened to a new song from the Chromatics called On the  Shoulders of Giants.  It is a very good acapella song commissioned for the Johannes Kepler Project for the International Year of Astronomy.  The song echoes the sentiment that we managed to get where we are today by standing on the shoulders of giants, all those people like Galileo, Newton, Kepler, etc. who did a lot of the early work in their fields.

I have been a longtime fan of the Chromatics and have their Astrocapella CD, a CD of acapella astronomy songs.  The Chromatics are composed of a lot of people who work at the Goddard Space Flight Center, so the songs have good science content in addition to being catchy.  I finally had the pleasure of meeting one of their songwriters, Padi Boyd, at a meeting last summer.

The International Year of Astronomy is coming quick…I will be blogging more on it and the exciting plans that are coming together!