Hands-On Astronomy

posted in: astronomy, friends, science 0

If you are anything like me, you have become accustomed to thinking of science as Big Science: science produced by NASA, JPL, and large universities and institutes all around the world. Well, I recently watched a fascinating documentary about a friend of mine, astronomer Larry Molnar, a professor at Calvin University, a small Christian liberal arts school in Michigan.

Larry has put the “t” in teaching, involving his undergraduate students in some serious hands-on study of contact binary stars—specifically, seeing if they can predict when binary system KIC 9832227 might come together and light up in a nova. (Prior to their work, novae could never be predicted more closely than “This star could erupt any time in the next ten thousand years.”) Does their prediction pan out? Watch the documentary to see.

The film is called Luminous, and was shot over the course of five years. It lets you see science as it actually is done, complete with frustration and disappointment, and success or failure hinging on uncertain data points. It touches a bit on Larry’s faith, just enough to highlight the fact that one can both have spiritual faith and do solid science. (On a personal note, when I saw them doing research at the University of Wyoming’s WIRO Observatory, it gave me a flashback. I spent some time at that observatory when I attended the Launchpad Astronomy Workshop in 2007.)

You can stream Luminous from a variety of sources, including Kanopy or Hoopla via your public library, the Roku channel—or for a few dollars, from most of the popular streaming sites like Apple+ and Prime (see Luminous for links).

We’ve known Larry and his amazing wife Cindy for something over thirty years, dating back to our attending the same church in Cambridge, Mass., and trading babysitting when our kids were very young. Larry was a postdoc at Harvard then. He helped me with brainstorming the science in my novel From a Changeling Star. We recently got to see them for the first time in many years! Here are Larry and Cindy, our mutual friend Peggy, and Allysen and me.

Click here for an earlier post featuring Larry’s and my snow sculpture of Sam the border collie.

Total Eclipse of the Sun

Magical. Almost supernatural, and yet Nature at its most astounding. In an instant, the world was turned inside out. The blazing corona around the darkened sun took my breath away. (And this was viewing through a thin layer of cloud. I can only imagine if the sky had been clear.) Just before totality, the horizon glowed with a 360-degree sunset. The air turned cold. Transcendent might not be too strong a word for the feeling when the sun winked out and the corona appeared.

This was my first-ever experience of a total eclipse. (Once, in the 70s, I was on the wrong side of a half-mile band of ocean separating me from the view of totality. Sorry, man, what a bummer.) It made totally worthwhile getting up at 3 a.m. to drive—ahead of the rush of thousands of others from Massachusetts—to Burlington, Vermont to watch the event. We arrived plenty early and found parking. We had the Mothership, and our dog McDuff, and we relaxed in comfort while we waited. Well, aside from shortness of sleep. But you can sleep when you’re dead, man.

The closest I have come to this in the past was our viewing in person of the launch of space shuttle Atlantis, in 2010, along with a group of fellow SF authors. In that event, the most memorable single element was the nova-like blaze of fire under the tail of the spaceship. That, like this, could not be conveyed by a photograph, much less my amateur video. In this case, I couldn’t even get a picture that registered what we were seeing at all.

Here’s a NASA photo from Dallas, TX, that did a better job (NASA/Keegan Barber):

When I watched the shuttle launch, I was in spine-tingling awe of the power of human striving against the bonds of the Earth. In this case, I was in transcendent awe of the majesty of our life-giving sun and our moon, and the stupendous coincidence or design of our Earth/Moon/Sun system boasting the perfect geometry of lunar size and distance such that the moon precisely covers the disk of the sun. What magnificent art is that astonishing corona, if art it is. Either way, it is breathtaking. And humbling.

I now understand why people say once you’ve seen a total eclipse, you want to keep on seeking them out. Even after surviving the two-hundred-mile traffic jam returning home (oh, for a flying car!). The next one on U.S. soil won’t be for twenty years, so maybe I have some international travel to look forward to! Zounds!

Ironically, this event was visible from my hometown of Huron, Ohio. If I’d been in the house I grew up in, I could have stepped out into the backyard. Same for my mom, God rest her soul, who grew up on a farm in Wooster, Ohio. Sometimes the spacetime continuum is in need of a little tweaking.

 

Head to the Spaceport and Book Passage!

posted in: astronomy, Golden Age, space 0

Forget Covid. Forget politics. Go outside tonight if you have any kind of clear sky and a view to the southeast and southwest—even if it’s between the trees and buildings. To the southeast, Mars and the Moon are about to fall into a dangerous, non-distancing embrace. They are spectacular together, with or without city light pollution. And to the southwest, Jupiter and Saturn continue to dance brightly (well, Jupiter is bright, Saturn is less so) at arm’s length.

I saw them all while walking the dogs (I couldn’t even see any stars), and was thrown right back to the 1950s and early 1960s, when the solar system was a simpler place, and we just knew that in another fifty years, we’d be able to head down to the Atom City Spaceport and hop on a luxury space-liner to any of those places. Those were the days! The Golden Era of Space Travel (as it should have been)!

Stand by for Mars cover

 

Jupiter, Saturn, and the Moon!

I came back from walking the dogs and saw a wonderful triad of the Moon, Jupiter, and Saturn—in a clear sky (by Boston standards), and right above my driveway. If I’m ever going to bring that beautiful Celestron telescope down from the dining room, I thought, this should be the time. So I limbered up with some back exercises* and lugged it downstairs. What a beautiful view! The Moon was glorious, Jupiter was spectacular, and Saturn was elusive. Finally I found it, though, with its rings tilted at a rakish angle. I texted my family, I phoned them: Get down here!

This is them, taking their turns at the scope.

And here is the worst astronomical picture ever: Jupiter and the Galilean moons, imaged with an Android phone held shakily to the eyepiece. I thought all I’d gotten was a blur. But when I checked later, I was pleased to see a recognizable picture of the planet! (The big blue smudge is an artifact. Either that, or it’s Neptune, photobombing my shot.)

In a world filled with wildfires, hurricanes, pandemic, and walking calamities in high public office, sometimes you just need a little piece of the cosmos to calm you down.

*Not really, but I should have. That thing is heavy.

Mercury and Venus Dance in the Evening Sky

posted in: astronomy 1

Remember when Venus was a planet of lush jungles and radiant oceans, and Mercury was a tidally locked world of extremes, its dayside treacherous with molten-metal pools and its nightside a frigid locker of exotic ices? And who knew what sorts of intelligent lifeforms existed to pose a communications challenge?

Such were the imagined worlds during the Golden Era of science fiction, the stories written in the 40s and 50s and early 60s, the stories I imprinted on as an avid young reader. Those visions may have been shattered by the real worlds discovered by space probes of the late Twentieth Century. But my mind was full of those images over the last couple of evenings as I peered through my binoculars at Venus and Mercury—seemingly close enough to reach out and tango—in the western twilight sky.

Oh, to have those Golden-era worlds back. The possibilities!

I tried to take a picture with my phone camera, but it was hopeless. Here are two NASA images, Mercury on the left and Venus on the right (not to scale). These are the worlds I saw, though the vision I saw was quite different!

Mercury and Venus - NASA galleries

Crescent Moon and Venus Over the Bike Path

Moon and Venus over bikepath

Captain Jack and I went for a little bike ride yesterday, to enjoy the pleasant evening. I found us riding straight into a breathtaking view of a slender, crescent moon, and bright Venus just above it. This picture gives just a hint. (What is it about stunning views of the sky in real life, and what you get on your phone camera—even a good camera?) Let’s zoom in…

Moon and Venus over bikepath_zoomed in

Here’s the captain, wondering why we’ve stopped.

Jack harnessed to bike

Starstream Could Be Real, Scientists (Almost) Say

Way back in the late 1980s when the rocks were still cooling, I wrote a pair of novels, From a Changeling Star and Down the Stream of Stars, that proposed an interstellar highway (sort of a modified wormhole) created by the joining of two black holes with a long strand of cosmic hyperstring. That same starstream features prominently in my new work, The Reefs of Time / Crucible of Time.

Now, I read here that real scientists have proposed that one could create a real wormhole, using—are you ready?—two black holes and a couple of strands of cosmic string. Seriously, is that cool or what? God, I love science!

 

Flat Mars Coverup!

posted in: aliens, astronomy, quirky, space 0


Mars Reconnaissance Observer (MRO) took pictures from orbit of the Phoenix Mars lander, roughly ten years apart. If this animated gif from NASA works correctly, you’ll see a blink comparison of the site ten years ago, and now. The evidence could not be more striking: Little Green Men (LGMs) have been systematically covering our lander with sand! They work slowly but steadily; they’ve even hidden the parachute (bottom). My theory is they’re part of the Flat Mars Society and are covering up evidence of life from off world. How devious.

This, combined with the famous hex-wrench socket on top of Saturn (see in motion here), offer clear proof of aliens meddling in and around our solar system. I suspect they live inside Saturn and go in and out through the hex hatch, but this has not yet been shown. Sciency research continues.

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