Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Government, NASA, Phil Plait, Politics, Science, Space, tech, YouTube
Half a penny on the dollar?
Well, off to have my CAT scan done.
Jim Downey
Via Phil Plait.
Filed under: Art, Astronomy, Carl Sagan, NASA, NPR, Science, Science Fiction, Space, Titan
I’m not big on Valentine’s Day. No, I’m not some kind of cold, unloving bastard. Quite the contrary – I resent the cynical manipulation by the greeting card and floral industries creating the expectation that men can only show their love on one special day each year. I love my wife and try to show it to her in many honest ways throughout the year.
But February 14th is memorable for me for another reason.
20 years ago on this day we received a picture – a perspective, if you will – which we had never seen before. That of Earth from the vantage of the Voyager 1 spacecraft – an image which has come to be known as the Pale Blue Dot. The book of the same name helped inspire and inform my writing of Communion of Dreams – a fact which can be seen in several passages, but which most readily comes to mind for me as this dream sequence:
The bridge was perhaps three meters wide, and arched slowly up in front of him, so that he couldn’t see the other end. It had walls of stone about a meter high, and periodically along those walls he could see small sculpted stone vases in which grew roses. Blue roses. He went over and peered into one of the buds, a clean blue light almost like a gas flame. The petals spread, until the flower was completely open.
Turning, he started to walk toward the rise in the center of the bridge. After a few dozen paces, he was almost halfway across the bridge, but he couldn’t see the other side. The fog seemed to rise up from the surface of the river, the bridge stretched off into a muzziness of grey. Then he noticed that the roses in a nearby vase were smaller, the light somehow more distant.
Another couple dozen paces and the end of the bridge where he had begun was almost out of sight. The roses had continued to shrink in size, and the light of each receded. It had grown darker, too, the sun had begun to shrink in size, as though retreating from him. He walked on. There was still no end in sight, just the bridge continuing into a growing dimness. The sun was smaller still, and had lost enough intensity that he could look straight at it without discomfort. The roses here were so small as to be hard to make out, the blue dot of light in each flower becoming pale. And he noticed that the walkway beneath his feet now felt spongy, like it was becoming insubstantial.
Tentatively taking a few more steps, at last he felt his foot sink into the bridge, and he started falling forward.
That’s from the end of Chapter Five, as the protagonist and his team of scientists are en route to Titan and are metaphorically crossing from the known to the unknown. Just as Voyager continues to do.
Happy Pale Blue Dot Day.
Jim Downey
All Things Considered had a nice piece about this photograph and what led to it last Friday, which includes this nice bit from Carl Sagan:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Feedback, General Musings, James Burke, Phil Plait, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Space
Happy Thanksgiving, to my American friends.
Perhaps thinking about giving thanks, and the question of my perspective from this vantage point in life, is what made this post from the Bad Astronomer pop out in my reading this morning. It’s about a scale model of the solar system hosted on the web. From the site:
This page shows a scale model of the solar system, shrunken down to the point where the Sun, normally more than eight hundred thousand miles across, is the size you see it here. The planets are shown in corresponding scale. Unlike most models, which are compressed for viewing convenience, the planets here are also shown at their true-to-scale average distances from the Sun. That makes this page rather large – on an ordinary 72 dpi monitor it’s just over half a mile wide, making it possibly one of the largest pages on the web.
Just for reference, the image of the Sun on my monitor is about 6″ diameter. Yeah, Pluto is a speck about 6,000x the diameter of the Sun away.
I love these sorts of things which convey the notion of deep distance (similar to the concept of deep time). One of these days I’d like to make it to Sweden to see the Sweden Solar System, which uses the Globe arena to represent the Sun, with Pluto a sphere about 5″ in diameter almost 200 miles away.
This question of scale – of the deep distance from one planet to another here in our solar system – is one which I tried to deal with honestly in writing Communion of Dreams. It’s why it takes over a week for the researchers sent out from Earth to reach Saturn (Well, Titan, actually) even using a constant thrust of about one-third gravity, and why there is a time-lag in radio communications of about 90 minutes (yeah, I researched not just the average distances between the planets, but where they would be in their respective orbits on the dates in the book – as well as what the intermediate time lag would be en route at various points). Which presented a problem in the writing – what to do with the characters in the book during this period? Which, in turn, is what I think made the readers at the publisher feel that the book moved too slowly in the first half.
Well, I still haven’t heard back from the publisher about the revisions I sent (and I didn’t expect to yet), so I don’t know whether I was able to address this concern adequately with the changes I made. And once I do hear, I expect that my perspective on the matter will change – as it always does, after the fact. Such is life. Such is the universe.*
Again, Happy Thanksgiving.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Apollo program, Art, Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Buzz Aldrin, Government, NASA, Neil Armstrong, Science, Society, Space, tech, Travel
. . . I decidedly *do* remember this, but it is a blast to see the pix again! From Phil Plait:
You just knew The Big Picture would take on the premier space event of the 20th century now, didn’t you?
Whoa. Head on over there for high-res spacey goodness! Many of those images made me a little choked up, in fact. Sigh.
I couldn’t agree more.
Further recollections on the 20th.
Jim Downey
Man, this stuff never gets old:
I am happy that I lived at the right time to see this whole technology develop. Amazing stuff.
Jim Downey
PS: That’s footage from the STS-125 mission. More available here, naturally.
Filed under: Art, Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Humor, Phil Plait, Science, Space
Via Phil Plait, a glimpse into how far woo can go wrong:
Orbiter crashing into the moon
There is a Japanese lunar orbiter named Kaguya that is scheduled to crash into the moon today at about 2:30 pm ET. Scientists hope to learn something about the moon’s composition by observing the debris that is kicked up.
In many traditions, including astrology, the moon represents the feminine. It is the yin, the intuitive, the emotions. Women are connected to the moon by their menstrual cycles while they are fertile, and all beings, including the earth herself, are affected by the pull of the tides.
* * *
Did these scientists talk to the moon? Tell her what they were doing? Ask her permission? Show her respect?
Wow.
Just . . . wow.
Believe it or not, I got similar comments from a number of people when I did my “Paint the Moon” project back in 2001. I don’t know if Ms. Harvey was one of the people who contacted me, but I did hear from people who were really worried that we were going to somehow ‘insult’ or harm the Moon by pointing laser pointers at it. I mean, I expected a fair number of folks who would miss the whole point of it being an art project, but some of these people were seriously lacking in any sense of scientific reality, who were actually worried that our little laser pointers would destroy the Moon or something.
Wow. Sometimes I think I am not nearly cynical nor pessimistic enough, to paraphrase Lily Tomlin.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Ballistics, Cassini, Depression, Enceladus, Guns, Health, NASA, Phil Plait, RKBA, Saturn, Science, Space
Man, I still feel like someone beat me with a bag of nickels.
I wonder if this is just an effect of having subjected myself to a lot of blast shock over a four day period? Shooting a lot of the ‘real world’ guns (we test something on the order of 40 with all the different ammos available from the previous tests) wasn’t such a big deal. But some of them – particularly the Bond derringers in the larger calibers – were just brutal to shoot 20 – 30 times in a row. And the blast from the short barrels of the chop tests could knock your teeth loose.
Anyway, I ache everywhere. And I’ve been fighting a mild depression for the last couple of days. At first it was just masked by being tired (the tests were hard, and I got too little sleep). Also, I figured that the emotional energy it took to be in close proximity to several other people constantly over five days time was a component – don’t get me wrong, I like everyone involved in the testing a lot, but I am just not used to being with people that much. But I have now had some time to recover, and I should be past the worst of that.
So, a little post-project blues. Or maybe the blast shock, repeated several thousand times, has something to do with it. I dunno. I’ll write more tomorrow, in the meantime take a few minutes to enjoy these great images of the Saturn system from the Cassini spacecraft, courtesy of the Boston Globe’s Big Picture series.
Jim Downey
(Via Phil Plait.)
Filed under: Astronomy, NASA, Predictions, Science, Space, Titan, Writing stuff
Well, the Advanced Survey Array from Communion of Dreams just got another step closer, and here’s a bit of insight into how I came up with much of the whole idea for the novel:
Telescope blasts into space to find other Earths
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NASA’s planet-hunting telescope, Kepler, rocketed into space Friday night on a historic voyage to track down other Earths in a faraway patch of the Milky Way galaxy.
It’s the first mission capable of answering the age-old question: Are other worlds like ours out there?
Kepler, named after the German 17th century astrophysicist, set off on its unprecedented mission at 10:49 p.m., thundering into a clear sky embellished by a waxing moon.
From NASA’s site on the mission:
The Delta II rocket carrying the Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft lifted off on time at 10:49 p.m. EST from Launch Complex 17-B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The spectacular nighttime launch followed a smooth countdown free of technical issues or weather concerns.
Kepler’s mission: to peer closely at a patch of space for at least three-and-a-half years, looking for rocky planets similar our own. The spacecraft will target an area rich with stars like our sun, watching for a slight dimming in the starlight as planets slip through the space between.
“Kepler is a critical component in NASA’s broader efforts to ultimately find and study planets where Earth-like conditions may be present,” said Jon Morse, the Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The planetary census Kepler takes will be very important for understanding the frequency of Earth-size planets in our galaxy and planning future missions that directly detect and characterize such worlds around nearby stars.”
It was this mission that I used as the basis for the Advanced Survey Array – specifically, the idea that such an array would need to be situated somewhere which would be shielded in order to allow the greatest possible sensitivity in the search for likely planets for colonization. Why? Well, here’s a bit from the Wikipedia entry for the Kepler mission:
Kepler is not in an Earth orbit but in an Earth-trailing solar orbit 950 miles above the Earth[11][12] so that Earth will not occlude the stars which are to be observed continuously and the photometer will not be influenced by stray light from Earth. This orbit also avoids gravitational perturbations and torques inherent in an Earth orbit, allowing for a more stable viewing platform. The photometer will point to a field in the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra, which is well out of the ecliptic plane, so that sunlight never enters the photometer as the spacecraft orbits the Sun. Cygnus is also a good choice to observe because it will never be obscured by Kuiper belt objects or the asteroid belt.[9]
So, the ASA needed to be somewhere where it would be isolated & stable, as the Kepler observatory is somewhat isolated and stable – and that led to the idea of creating an electromagnetic “bubble” around Titan (where I wanted to situate the novel), caused by . . . what? It was at this point that I came up with the idea for the super-conducting ‘Tholan gel’, and from there . . . well, read the book. I don’t want to give away too many spoilers.
Anyway, glad that Kepler finally got off the ground – and I’m looking forward to the data which comes from it!
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 