Colbert Takes on Galileo

I just wanted to post a quick note that Derrick Pitts of the Franklin Institute is going to be the guest on the Colbert Report tonight.   The Franklin Institute is having special exhibition of one of Galileo’s telescopes opening April 4th in the middle of 100 Hours of Astronomy.

They also may talk about the Galieleoscope, one of the projects for the International Year of Astronomy.  As I have blogged before, the Galileoscope is a low cost ($15+shipping) telescope that you can use to see the rings of Saturn and other wonders.  See the Galileosocope web site for more info.

Tune in tonight…I will post video of the interview when it is available.

Turn Out the Lights: It’s Earth Hour

Tonight, March 28th, people in cities around the world will turn off their lights in honor of Earth Hour. And it really is an hour: from 8:30pm to 9:30pm local time.  Cities across the USA and the world are participating, turning off as many outdoor lights as they can (lights critical for safety are not turned off, of course!)  Major US landmarks are going dark including Broadway and the Vegas Strip (that I want to see!)

You are encouraged to take photos or videos of the event and upload them.  Blogging and Twittering are also encouraged.

As for me, I will be manning a telescope at a star party at the University of Arziona in Tucson. We have some people around town with light meters who will try to measure potential changes as well as photographers at strategic points around town taking pictures before, during and after Earth Hour.  Earth Hour is a major event in Tucson, which is one of the best cities in the country for its outdoor lighting policies.

Now if I can’t appeal to your sense of environmental awareness and responsibility guys, chicks dig candleliht dinners for a cause.  It might help you tomorrow night in another department if you know what I mean!

So turn out the lights, just for an hour.

The Spacebat Memorial

A lot of people know that a bat was clinging to Discovery’s external tank when it lifted off.  There is now a Space Bat Memorial Page filled with tributes, including the following Youtube video.

There is a store where you can buy Space Bat merchandise.

This little guy reminds me of the whale in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  A creature that really doesn’t play a part in the plot but kind of captures your heart in a weird way.  RIP Space Bat.

Find Pulsars and Black Holes With Einstein@Home

Many people are familair with the SETI@Home Project where your spare CPU cycles help search for extraterrestrial radio signals.  Universe Today had a nice story on the next step of the Einstien@Home Project.

Einstein@Home will let your computer join in the serach exotic objects such as binary pulars or a pulsar orbiting a black hole.  First, a quick tutorial on what these things are.

A pulsar is a leftover from a supernova explosion.  At the end of their lives, massive stars blow up.  The core of the star collapses leaving behind a small ball (about 6 miles across or so) of neturons.  This little ball has more mass than our Sun crushed down to a very small sphere.  The density is incredible, it’s like a city size atomic nucleus.  When the core collapses, it stars spinning faster (just like a figure skater pulling in her arms spins faster).  The spin, combined with the neutron stars magnetic field, gives off pulses of radio waves on a regular basis, frequently a few dozen times per second.

Sometimes we get two of these stars orbiting each other.  These are hard to detect, especially if they have orbital periods shorter than an hour.  The shorter the orbital period, the closer together they are.  As two pulsars orbit each other, they give off enery (in the form of gravity waves) and slowly spiral into each other and will eventually collide giving off gamma rays, gravity waves, and forming a black hole. It would be fun if we could find these things in advance to watch them do this!  We have some experiments such as LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory) that could potentially see these gravity waves.

The program will also search for pulsars orbiting black holes.  A black hole is even more extreme than a neutron star, a region of space with so much mass packed into such a small space that not even light can escape.

To join the search, simply download the Bionic software and enter the url http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/ when promted so you search for pulsars and black holes.

Gravity waves were predicted by Einstien almost 100 years ago.  They are very difficult to detect and we are just getting to the point where we might be able to find them.  This project will help us figure out how often we should see them as we learn how often these types of mergers occur. And I really want to find gravity waves!

Name That Rover

Fresh off the closing of the contest to name the new ISS module (in which the name Colbert got the most votes) voting is now open in the contest to Name the Rover.

The rover in question is the next Mars rover known by the somewhat uninpiring name of the Mars Science Laboratory.  Now schedule to launch in 2011, it will be much larger than the current rovers.  The MSL will be powered by a radioisotope power supply which will allow it to travel farther, faster, and use more instruments that the solar powerd rovers (and won’t be subject to dusty solar panels which produce less power). It suite of instruments will be able to perform much more advanced analysis of soil chemistry and determine whether Mars was or is capable of supporting life.

There are some nice videos on the site to check out as well…vote soon..voting only runs from March 23rd to the 29th!

The Morning and Evening Star

D’oh!  This snuck up on me and I almost forgot to blog it.  Today and the next couple of days give sharp eyed observers a rare chance to see Venus as the evening star and the morning star on the same day!  Venus is just about to pass between the Earth and the Sun.  However, it does not pass directly between the Earth and the Sun, but rather north of the Sun by almost 8 degrees.  This separation is about as big as it gets when Venus passe between the Earth and the (also called inferiof cojnunction) which makes this tricky observation possible.  HINT: Venus will be slighlty to the North of the Sun (right at sunset, left at sunrise if you are in the northern hemisphere).

Simply look west RIGHT after sunset for Venus.  Do the same thing RIGHT befor sunsrise.  When I say right before or right after, I am talking about five minutes, 10 tops.  You need a good clear horizon to see this.  If you spot Venus, train binoculars on it.  You will see a VERY thin cresent…it is really cool!

I want to warn you: DO NOT USE BINOCULARS IF THE SUN IS ABOVE THE HORIZON.  Venus is very close to the Sun and you don’t want to risk looking at the Sun with binoculars.

This is one of those tricky visual observations.  It takes no special equipment…just patience and a sharp eye…the kind I really love to try.

You can only do this once every 8 years, so do it now or wait until 2017!

You can hear more about this on today’s episode of the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast.

Saturn’s Dancing Moons

I was away at the NSTA meeting in New Orleans and hadn’t managed to post for a few days.  I get back today and find that the Cassini Team has relased some spectacular images and movies of Saturn’s Moon’s casting shadows on the rings!

Saturn is nearing its equinox later this year.  Near the equinox is the only time you can see moon shadows cast on Saturn’s rings and we have NEVER had a spacecraft at Saturn to capture these images before!  This image shows Saturn’s moon Epimetheus as its shadow moved across the rings over the course of about an hour.  Click on the image to see a larger, flash version of the animation.

Since the rings are almost edge on to the Sun, the shadows cast by the Moons are very long.  If you could stand on a particle in the rings, the Sun would be very low in the sky right now.  Shadows grow long.  You can do this yourself here on Earth.  Take a large ball outside a few minutes before sunset. Hold it up and look at its shadow.  You will see the shadow of the ball is not round, but long and thin.  We are seeing an extreme case of this phenomena here.

We knew this should happen based on the geometry for many years.  Now we finally get to see it!

The Equinox is Not Quite Equal

Yep, today is the spring equinox.  But its not quite equal amounts of day and night.  Checking the Weather Underground for Tucson yields 12 hours and 6 minutes from sunrise to sunset.

So where does that extra six minutes come from?  The equinox would be equal day and night if Earth were a perfect sphere and had not atmosphere.  Refraction effects due to Earth’s atmosphere lengthen our day a bit.  The exact amound depends on somewhat on your latitude.  For instance, in Anchorage the day will be 12 hours and 10 minutes long tomorrow and at Barrow, Alaska 12 hours and 15 minutes.

NASA is celebrating with a Sun-Earth Day Webcast at 1:00pm edt.  Enjoy the equinox, even if it isnt’ quite equal.

Another Close Meteor Flyby

After my recent blog about a near meteor that flew by Earth, a couple of people mentioned how they didn’t hear about it until afterwards (and I even heard Dvorak and Curry discuss Comet Lulin on No Agenda and seemed to imply that it was a sudden appearance in spite of the fact that it was discoverd in 2007).

Orbit of 2009FH from NASA/JPL

So this is just a heads up…recently disovered asteroid 2009 FH will pass by Earth at about 80,000km at 8:17edt tomorrow,  March 18th. Its only about 50 feet wide, so it is smaller than the previous one.  No chance of it hitting Earth and it is well beyond our geosyncrhonous satellites so all is good there as well.

It might seem like a lot of these things are zipping by…but we are just getting good at discovering them.  And since we have advance notice, I bet some astronomers are going to get some images of this one.

Geekpop ‘09

I was catching up on my podcasts listening to the Naked Scientists last week and they highlighted an online music festival called Geekpop.  Geekpop is a virtual music festival with music about and inspired by science.  The festival has several different stages you can explore and listen to music from different bands.  There is even a lost and found in case you misplace something while attending the festival.

I have long been a fan of music that incorporates science such as Lynda Williams to the Chromatics.  There are several sites with links to science songs that have helped me build a pretty geeky mp3 collection.

Some people think its odd to have science songs, but would you rather your kid listen to gangsta rap, or MC Hawking?