10 Oct 2008

Sarah Palin and Mirrors on the Moon

posted in: public affairs, science, space | 0

No, as far as I know, Sarah Palin isn’t advocating mirrors on the moon; astronomers are. But an interesting response to Sarah Palin came across my desk today, and so did a piece about, you know, mirrors on the moon. So, two birds with one stone.

In the recent VP candidate debate, because it was clear that with Sarah Palin’s looks and folksy charm, Joe Biden was in a match with both hands tied behind his back, and maybe his feet, too. I thought he did just fine. Probably the best commentary on the debate was Saturday Night Live’s dead-on impersonation of Palin by Tina Fey. If you missed it, you can catch it on NBC’s web site.

Today, though, I saw a particularly incisive written commentary from England, by Michelle Goldberg of The Guardian, who said in part:

At least three times last night, Sarah Palin, the adorable, preposterous vice-presidential candidate, winked at the audience. Had a male candidate with a similar reputation for attractive vapidity made such a brazen attempt to flirt his way into the good graces of the voting public, it would have universally noted, discussed and mocked. Palin, however, has single-handedly so lowered the standards both for female candidates and American political discourse that, with her newfound ability to speak in more-or-less full sentences, she is now deemed to have performed acceptably last night.

By any normal standard, including the ones applied to male presidential candidates of either party, she did not. Early on, she made the astonishing announcement that she had no intentions of actually answering the queries put to her. “I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I’m going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also,” she said.

And so she preceded, with an almost surreal disregard for the subjects she was supposed to be discussing, to unleash fusillades of scripted attack lines, platitudes, lies, gibberish and grating references to her own pseudo-folksy authenticity….

Read the whole column. It’s so, so true.

On a far cheerier note, NASA’s science newsletter today reports on proposed plans to place giant, liquid-metal telescope mirrors on the surface of the Moon. The reason? Huge mirrors outside Earth’s atmosphere could do astronomy that would make the Hubble seem like a school science project. And liquid mirrors could do that for far less money. Basically, you put the liquid in a stable basin, and you spin it at a very moderate speed. The result: a nearly perfect parabolic mirror surface. At Science@NASA.

“No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.” —Edward Hopper

2 Oct 2008

Dog Star

posted in: animal friends, personal news, science, science fiction, space, writing | 0

I can’t believe I forgot to mention this earlier. I recently sold a short story—the first short piece I’ve written in years—to Diamonds in the Sky, an online anthology edited by Michael Brotherton and funded by NASA to promote astronomy education. It’s going to be available online realsoonnow, I understand. The anthology is intended as a free online resource for astronomy teachers and students, bringing together a group of science fiction stories each of which illustrates a particular astronomical concept. The hope is that the stories will be a fun way to learn science, and might even make some difficult concepts clearer than a straight expository approach. It’s to be kept “in print” indefinitely, so that teachers—and their students!—can always go back to it.

In a way, it’s a throwback to the Golden Days of Science Fiction, when men were Real Men, and the science in science fiction was Real Science. (Sometimes, anyway.) It should be interesting.

Oh—the title of my story is “Dog Star.” It’s about a boy and his dog and asteroids and dark energy.

25 Jan 2008

Virgin Galactic’s Spaceliner Design Unveiled

posted in: science fiction, space | 0

So you’re ready to fly into space, but you don’t have $200,000 handy to buy a ticket? Me neither. But we can dream together, can’t we? Virgin Galactic has released designs for SpaceshipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo, currently under construction at Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites air/spacecraft factory. This thing is gigacool. It’s one of the best reasons I can think of for winning the lottery (and I can think of quite a few). They’ve also got a video, with some animated depictions of a flight. New Mexico spaceport, here we come!

It’s been a few years now since I wrote my short story, “Rocket Ride! A Short Day’s Journey into Space,” about traveling in just such a machine. But you can still read it here.

“And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”
— John Gillespie Magee, Jr

7 Dec 2007

Flying Saucers in Saturnian Orbit!

posted in: quirky, science, science fiction, space | 0

Yes! From no less a source than Space.com and NASA comes news of weirdo flying saucers in orbit around the planet Saturn! In fact, they’ve even got computer-generated pictures, which are almost as good as real ones. Here’s the one they’re calling the moon Atlas, as generated by computer, based on findings from the Cassini probe:


You can also look at a nice big blowup.

Now, those scientists are such jokers, they expect us to believe that those are natural moon formations, caused by ring material building up on the equators of the moons. But I say, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. So, nuthin’ doin. I believed them when they said the Face of Mars wasn’t made by aliens. And what did they do? They sent those rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, out to roll back and forth over the face until they’d obliterated the image! (But here, you can look at some other cool shots.)

You all remember the hex socket on Saturn’s pole, right?

You think it’s a COINCIDENCE that this same planet has flying saucers going around it???!!! I think NOT!

Write your Congress persons and demand that they send a mission to investigate aliens in our solar system!

So say we all.

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” —Ray Bradbury

8 Oct 2007

X-wing Fighter Flies! (briefly)

posted in: quirky, science fiction, space | 0

Some people talk, and some people do. Here’s a group of people who decided to build their own X-wing fighter model (you know, the craft Luke Skywalker flew in Star Wars), and make it fly! We’re not talking a little bitty model, but a model 21 feet long! That’s ambition. Before you look at the video, take a look at their beautiful project.

Now you can watch it fly in two different video views (scroll down for second). Well, U.S. rockets used to blow up all the time, too. But they got better.

Here’s a longer video, showing the setup, etc.

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” —Thomas Mann

5 Oct 2007

Sputnik, Half a Century Later

posted in: personal news, public affairs, science, science fiction, space, technology | 0

Can it really be fifty years since Sputnik beep-beeped its way around the globe, ushering in the space age and scaring Americans half to death? (The Commies are going to bomb us! Their rockets work, but ours always blow up!) I guess it has been. (By the time I get this up, it’s going to be October 5, but let’s just pretend it’s still October 4, okay? I mean, somewhere in the U.S., it still is.)

Lots has been written in newspapers and elsewhere about the anniversary, but I thought I’d note a few reflections about what Sputnik meant to me, an 8-year-old kid in Huron, Ohio. I remember fear, because the Russkies were ahead of us. But I also remember great excitement, because we were finally in space! (In this part of the brain, it was okay to think of them as being part of us, which was really how I preferred to think of things anyway.) In the long run, the excitement way outweighed the fear. The Space Race was on!

I can still taste the thrill of watching our early rockets lift off, of following every single space mission with intense interest—and I don’t just mean manned space missions. I mean everything. The Echo satellite, a big Mylar balloon that reflected radio waves. Telstar, the first active communications satellite. Ranger and Surveyor to the moon. Mariner to Mars and Venus. I knew all the rockets by shape and size: Delta, Atlas, Titan, Atlas Agena, Atlas Centaur, Saturn. I knew what rockets were coming down the pike. (I’m still waiting for the Nova, which would have dwarfed the Saturn V.) I idolized Werner von Braun. (We didn’t know about the Nazi part then.)

And then, of course, there were the manned missions. I remember our classes at school (6th or 7th grade) being pulled out to go to the room where there was a TV to watch both the scrubbed attempts and finally the launch of Alan Shepherd into space. “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?” I think I was at home for Gus Grissom’s flight. In school for John Glenn’s. It was a wondrous time. So full of passion and innocence. But I also remember the devastating news of the Apollo 1 fire, which put an end to the innocence. And finally on up to the landing of the Eagle. “Tranquility Base here…” I still get shivers when I watch video footage of Apollo 11’s launch.

Besides engrossing me, one pronounced effect of this ferment of space activity was my passion for reading science fiction. I’m pretty sure the two were linked. As I watched the real space travelers, I had no doubt—one iota of doubt— that our future as a species was in space. I lived that future through the exploits of Tom Swift, Jr. and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet—and of course through the stories of Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke and Leinster and Del Rey and Lesser and Nourse and Norton and White and a hundred others. I never felt that there was anything unreal about these visions of our future in the stars. On those periodic occasions when someone asked me why I didn’t read about real things, I simply didn’t know how to answer; the question made no sense to me.

In a way, it still makes no sense to me. That was the beginning but not the end of my love affair with science fiction, and I have always felt that it was the most real of all kinds of fiction.

Hey, Sputnik—thanks for getting the ball rolling.

“Writing itself is an act of faith, and nothing else.” —E. B. White

13 Sep 2007

Dark Matter Galaxies, and the Loss of a Literary Star

posted in: science, science fiction, space | 0

Space.com reports the apparent discovery of “Hobbit” galaxies—tiny, ultrafaint, dwarf galaxies in our local group—which appear to consist mostly of dark matter. Though they were observed by their stars, which presumably are made of normal matter, gravitational calculations based on the movements of the stars indicate that the galaxies are 100 times more massive than the estimated total mass of their stars. The rest? Dark matter, more than likely. The findings will be published in the Astrophysical Journal in November.

Meanwhile, you may already have heard that Madeleine L’Engle died on September 6, 2007, another great loss to the book world. She is best known, of course, for the A Wrinkle in Time series of young adult novels, but she wrote many other books, as well. (Her official web site)

I never got to meet her, though we exchanged some correspondence once. Paradoxically, I didn’t discover her books at a young age, but as an adult. (Someone tried to turn me on to A Wrinkle in Time at a particularly sensitive age—when I didn’t want to read “YA” and I didn’t want my SF to read like fantasy. So that effort failed. But I tried the book years later, and that time it clicked. Marvelous.)

Farewell, creator of Mrs. Who and all the others. And thank you.

“You have to write whichever book it is that wants to be written. And then, if it’s going to be too difficult for grown-ups, you write it for children.” —Madeleine L’Engle

30 Aug 2007

Lunar Eclipse and New Writing

posted in: personal news, science, space, writing | 0

I wasn’t able to see the August 28 lunar eclipse, but Jerry Oltion—SF writer, amateur astronomer, and member of our Launchpad astronomy team—sent us a photo he took. I thought it was so beautiful, I asked his permission to put it here on my blog:

Photo by Jerry Oltion

Seeing the photo reminded me of one of the NASA pages I read prior to the eclipse, suggesting that we imagine what it would be like to stand on the moon during an eclipse, surrounded by that incredible copper-glowing landscape. I think it would be a pretty mind-blowing experience. And as Jerry said, “Imagine what the Earth would look like from there. A dark hole in the sky with city lights glowing in it, surrounded by a ring of blood-red atmosphere.”

Here’s a montage Jerry put together, of the phases of the eclipse:


Jerry has larger images on his website, and they’re worth a look; these smaller reproductions don’t do them justice.

Meanwhile, I’ve been putting finishing touches on a short story (my first in many years!) that I hope will find its way into print eventually. More on that when I have something to report. (The name of it is “Dog Star.”)

Starting a new book is often just about the hardest thing in the world for me, and I’ve been having a devil of a time getting anywhere with the beginning of the next Chaos book, to follow Sunborn. Tonight, I decided to take Buckbeak out for a spin after dinner, in hopes that the night air would clear my head and bring some inspiration. It worked, at least a little bit. I came home with a couple of new thoughts on how to make this beginning work, and I’ve started putting it down in pixels and electrons. Feeling more hopeful, and now let me get back to it!

“Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art.” —Leonardo da Vinci

16 Aug 2007

A Star That Sheds Like Our Cat!

posted in: quirky, science, space | 0

By now, you’ve probably seen news reports about the star Mira (pronounced my-rah), in the constellation Cetus. It’s barreling through the galactic medium at unusual speed and as a result is shedding a trail of starstuff. In the ultraviolet pictures from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer, it looks like a comet:

The Star
Our cat

You might not have seen the cool animation NASA has online, though, along with explanation of how it is probably a bow-wave effect that’s causing the tail.

There’s supplemental material on another NASA page.

I can’t believe how much great astronomy has been coming our way in the last year or two.

“It is with words as with sunbeams—the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.” —Robert Southey

22 Jul 2007

Launchpad Finale

posted in: personal news, space | 0

The final observing night looked as though it would be a washout, or rather a cloud-out. We drove some distance to get to the WIRO Observatory in the mountains that from Laramie are a part of the horizon. Cloudy, cloudy. A drive up the winding, dirt mountain road made me think I was back at Cedar Point. When we finally reached the top, the conditions looked hopeless for even opening the observatory dome. So we looked at the telescope instead:



And gathered in the control room while our enterprising grad-student operators tried to get the aging computer system to cooperate:


And even posed for a group photo (shot by Jeremiah Tolbert):


Gradually, though, the sky began to clear—just a few stars, at first. Hoping for the best, we opened the dome. By the time the system was up and running, more of the sky was clearing—and within an hour or two, we had a spectacular view of the Milky Way overhead (for those of us who wandered outside to stand in the dark). In the meantime, the telescope was starting to pull in images.

It was instructive to watch the process. Telescopes take photos in black and white, not color. To achieve color images, successive pictures are taken in red, blue, and green, and combined on the computer to produce a final image. And that is exactly what we did in the end. Most of the group had left by midnight, but the few of us remaining watched images come in of the Pelican Nebula. We left with the gray and white images on a CD. In the morning, someone who knew how to do the computer wizardry combined them to produce the photo that we have adopted as our workshop badge: the Pelican Nebula, in glorious color:


We’re done with all the sessions now, with only our closing party to look forward to. It’s been a great week, and while I look forward to getting home, I’m also sorry to see it end.

I’m going to end with this quote that seems utterly appropriate to me.

“I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children’s books ask questions, and make the readers ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone’s universe.” —Madeleine L’Engle

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