From NASA's Image of the Day, an artistic shot of the sun going down on Mars. In addition to being really beautiful, it certainly raises some important questions, such as: there's an alternative to the reviled (by me) Astronomy Picture of the Day?
NASA - Sunset on Mars
And for your astronomically-themed seasonal viewing enjoyment, more pictures of things in space!
Bad Astronomy puts up their "runner up" of the best astro pictures of 2007, and it still beats the hell out of APOD's APOY. Changing the last initial of your name still won't make you cool, APOD. Of course, they just did that to make it stand for "year," but I still consider it suspect. For instance, they pick one shot which is just the International Space Station orbiting the Earth. Well, I for one, would prefer that NASA spend more of its budget on research grants, rather than on pointless manned missions that do nothing to increase our understanding of the universe, but hey, that's just me. Seeing something like that just reminds me of how the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has shifted its focus away from real science. Oh yeah, APOD is hosted on a NASA URL. How convenient. (Even during holiday season, no mercy for APOD!) And how they managed to ignore the Carina Nebula altogether astonishes me. Morons.
On the other hand, BA is dead on. They've got Cassini's Saturn pic, the shot of Earth that I believe ought to replace the worn out 'Blue Marble.' And I absolutely love this photo on BA's list, its flickr page gives the background:
I came upon this juxtaposition one early evening in early May, 2007. The crane was stationed on East 32nd St. in Manhattan. I took this shot looking east from 2nd Ave. This is not a Photoshop trick folks -- just a lucky shot.
Well, it was a lucky shot, of course -- but it also took some positioning and some daring on my part to stand in the middle of 2nd Ave. as cars barreled down on me. To get this shot I had to stand exactly at the right spot (and I do mean spot), steady my nerves (and hands) and take the shot before the cars could reached me. Those rush-hour NYC drivers DID NOT seem to be willing to slow down for me.
It's amazing how quickly the moon moves across the sky. Normally this is mostly imperceptible... until you try to align it with something (such as the crane) only to realize 20 seconds later, when you are ready to take your shot, that it has already moved. I took about 8 shots and had to reposition myself 3 times.
As of 5/30/07 the crane was still there. The moon, however, has since moved.
Another purge from my overfilled drafts folder-- this kickass compilation of the last 2000 years of eclipses. The white streaks represent the paths of total eclipses, and the lighter the area the more frequently it has been eclipsed. As noted by EPOD, the Northern Hemisphere is lighter than the southern because during the summer months the Sun is slightly farther from the Earth, and thus more likely to be eclipsed by the moon, whose size in the sky does not change*. Also, when it is the summer the days are longer so there are more sunlight hours to take advantage of. Over time, these things compound each other to produce quite a dramatic difference between the two hemispheres.
EPOD stands for Earth (Science) Picture of the Day. As a competitor of the super-lame APOD I heartily approve. And yet, it is unfortunate that there aren't more things worth taking pictures of on Earth.
*As far as we know. Teach the controversy people!
Yesterday, I took those APOD doofuses to the wheelhouse. My parting shot was a reflection on the ubiquity of the Sombrero Galaxy. Not that it isn't a nice place or anything, just that it's like the first picture you see in astronomy. So of course, what is today's APOD? M104. And not just an ordinary photo, today's shows it across multiple radiation spectra! As if to say "You don't like the Sombrero? Here's four fucking Sombreros! How do you like me now?!" Typical immature Astronomy Picture of the Day behavior.
As everyone around here knows, I am no fan of the Astronomy Picture of the Day. (See 1, 2, 3). The picture of the day? Who do these people think they are?
What about "Sunrise from the Surface of Gliese 581c" (recently discovered Earth-like planet) is a "picture"? Paintings don't count, nerd. Astronomy paintings are the sort of cheesy "artist's conceptions" that belong on the covers of bad sci-fi paperbacks, or the walls of people who own "healing crystals." The only thing missing is a winged unicorn flying over a rainbow.
Neither this, nor this, nor this are "pictures" (especially not when you run it multiple times). These ones aren't astronomy. And these things are just retarded.
I didn't start out looking to embarrass APOD like this (it just happened), the actual point is to draw attention to the strange fact that there is an Astronomy Picture of the Day discussion board. Does the internet not have enough interactivity at this point? Is there anyone out there who still feels somehow unable to express themselves? We can all leave our moronic comments on articles from our equally moronic mainstream newspapers without even leaving the basement. As other people have pointed out, we have even created that absolute cesspool of human communication, YouTube comments; where you can garner responses of hate speech, chain letters, porn ads, and racial slurs, several hours after posting a clip of a child learning to ride a bicycle, as long as enough people watch it.
So come to think of it, APOD's discussion board isn't so bad in comparison. I just find it funny that an online community could spring into existence surrounding a daily astronomical image. I am trying to imagine the kind of people who clamored for an online place to air their thoughts and opinions about this this particular online installment. People united in their common desire to confer and discuss with others who feel as strongly about daily astronomy as they themselves. "I must know what people's favorite APOD is. Why can't I discuss it with other APOD aficionados in an interactive online environment? Something must be done!"
Of course, the questions are actually mostly astronomical inquiries from curious amateurs, and anything that helps people learn about astronomy is a good thing...blah blah blah. So the commenters get my approval, but the APOD management is inching ever closer to my list.
Yeah geniuses, we've never seen the Sombrero Galaxy before.
I am going to take a page out of Zosia's book and post this fantastic panorama of the Carina Nebula just released by Hubble. Amazingly, the area in this photo of constant starbirth actually spans 50 light-years. It consists of 48 pictures incorporated seamlessly together with "Red correspond[ing] to sulfur, green to hydrogen, and blue to oxygen emission." It will almost certainly be tomorrow's Astronomy Picture of the Day, so it gives me pleasure to preempt them like this, as imaginary revenge for this time, when they beat me to an awesome photo of the Orion Bullet Pillars. Plus, I turned it on its side and enbiggened it, because I know enough to tell that it doesn't matter which side is up. Unlike those APOD jerks...
Update: As usual, we were right. Now the question becomes, why is APOD so afraid to admit that they were beaten to the punch?
I was planning on putting up an unadorned link to this spectacular view of iron projectiles piecing through a nebula from Scientific American (photo by Gemini). But the Astronomy Picture of the Day stole my thunder so now I'm going to use their explanation and then add an insightful complaint about something completely different in the post below this one.Why are bullets of gas shooting out of the Orion Nebula? Nobody is yet sure. First discovered in 1983, each bullet is actually about the size of our Solar System, and moving at about 400 km/sec from a central source dubbed IRc2. The age of the bullets, which can be found from their speed and distance from IRc2, is very young -- typically less than 1,000 years. As the bullets rip through the interior of the Orion Nebula, a small percentage of iron gas causes the tip of each bullet to glow blue, while each bullet leaves a tubular pillar that glows by the light of heated hydrogen gas.
Here is one of those lousy diluted posts I was just promising.
-I seem to have beat the actual physics bloggers to the punch with that Jim Carey-Conan O'Brien Quantum physics video...by about a week. I also managed to figure out (and get confirmation) that the paper they discussed was Phys. Rev Lett. 83 (1999) by L. J. Lapidus, D. Enzer, and G. Gabrielse: "Stochastic Phase Switching of a Parametrically Driven Electron in a Penning Trap." To summarize: I'm amazing.
-Obligatory shot of the sixth planet recently captured by Cassini. Two observations:
1. I have recently been teaching assisting an intro astronomy course that involves looking at Saturn through a telescope. A partially mechanized and difficult to align telescope in an awesome 19th century shed with a roof that opens by a crank on the wall. A lot of the students first react when looking through the eyepiece by saying something like "it looks so real!" I can partially understand this impulse; when first visiting famous locations or monuments I have usually had a similar reaction, where I'm not really astonished by the sight itself, but primarily at the familiarity of it and the novelty of beholding say, the Lincoln Memorial, in person. It must be some kind of side-effect of being extremely familiar with things that ought to impress us that makes this the first thought to come to our minds in these situations--still, people should try not to vocalize their bewilderment at the existence of well-known objects. You just sound retarded.
2. Cassini may be the only NASA mission which is way more famous than its namesake. Think about it, you have Galileo, Apollo, Ulysses, Hubble, Chandra, and so forth. Chandrasekhar may not be known to the general public, but the kind of people who are aware of the telescope certainly know who he is. All I ever knew about Cassini was that he discovered the gap in Saturn's rings, and some further research shows that he discovered of Jupiter's Great Red Spot as well. Let's face it Cassini fans, they would have found those sooner or later anyway.
(Credit goes here)
(Updata: Astronomy Picture of the Day is riding my coattails--as usual)
-Some clever cognitionists have determined that 17 is the most random number. Inspired initially by the good folks at Cosmic Variance they set out to compile poll data confirming the original suspicion that given a choice from 1 to 20, 17 is the most frequently picked "random" integer. It is indeed so, with roughly four times the popularity expected in a truly random distribution. Even numbers and multiples of 5 scored poorly, and similarly prime numbers like 7, 13 and 19 were the runners-up. They were able to get around ~350 responses from people who were presumably not aware of the hypothesis being tested (they put a poll on their site without explaining why--hopefully they weren't biased CV readers). They also found some other effects like a preference for primes and little preference for odds. I would like to see more data though, I am betting that the primes thing is only true for these low numbers and that with a larger range you would see significantly more odds than evens as well as a severe allergy to multiples of 10. They do a round up here.
-Far, far overdue acknowledgement of "How to Tell a True Lab Story," a parody of this Tim O'Brien vignette that I only today encountered. Anyone who, like me, has ingrained high school memories of the disjointed Vietnam stories in The Things They Carried will recognize and appreciate these paragraphs.A true lab story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper scientific practice, nor restrain graduate students from doing the things that graduate students have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a lab story, you feel uplifted, or if you feel that you have learned some useful fact about science, you have been made the victim of an old and terrible lie...
You can tell a true lab story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, and afterwards you ask "Can you really destroy a bathroom with liquid nitrogen in a soda bottle?" and if the answer matters, you've got your answer
ordinarily, i wouldn't bother to comment on an apod photo, but today's is just too good: an attempt to depict cosmic rays gone horribly awry.
