The Bad Astronomy Newsletter

Bad Astronomy Newsletter #15

Contents:

1. Radio interview: "A.M. Coast-to-Coast"
2. Newsletter and book notes
3. Astronomy News: Milky Way eats a cluster; NICMOS back on track
4. Subscribe/Unsubscribe info

The official website is http://www.artbell.com.

From there, you can find out if it's playing at a local station, or how to listen on the web. I'll be plugging my book, talking about my day job doing education and public outreach with some NASA satellites, and of course blasting pseudoscience. The show lasts three hours, and I have jury duty the next day. Yikes.

2) Newsletter and book notes

This week, I was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, attending a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The AAS is the largest professional society of astronomers in the United States, and meets twice a year to talk about, duh, astronomy. I attended this meeting to promote Swift and GLAST, two NASA satellites for which I help with the Education and Public Outreach effort.

I was also there as press. Yes, I am now an actual journalist. More about that in section 3 of the newsletter. Anyway, the reason it's been a while since the last newsletter was because of this and other business meetings I was attending. I'm home for a while now, thankfully.

As an aside, the book "Bad Astronomy" is still doing well. The second printing just arrived at the publishers warehouse, so people buying the book now will actually get one with fewer mistakes. Actually, there were about 24 minor typos and the like fixed, and one scientific one I am also too embarrassed to admit (it was in the tides chapter, and had to do with how the Earth and Moon swap orbital energy). It's been fun talking about the book with other scientists there at the meeting too. One guy even gave a talk about the Moon Hoax and how to use it in class to teach critical thinking! All in all, it was a great time.

3) Astronomy News: Milky Way eats a cluster; NICMOS back on track

As I said, I was actually at the meeting as press. I attended several press conferences, which has been very interesting. It's fun to see someone else in the hotseat!

There is way too much science to report on for any one person, but I did cover a couple.

One story is that a cluster of stars called a globular cluster has been found which is being torn apart by the gravity of the Milky Way. The cluster's orbit takes it right through the plane of the Milky Way, and when it passes through the tidal force from the Galaxy stretches the cluster, and the outermost stars get stripped off. These stars have formed two long streamers leading and trailing the cluster. The next time the cluster passes through the plane, it'll probably get destroyed.

The other story I covered was the re-activation of NICMOS, an infrared camera onboard Hubble. NICMOS needs to be cooled or else its own heat interferes with its performance. The coolant ran out in '99, but it was just replaced with a mechanical cooler, pretty much a fancy refrigerator that keeps the instrument running at the right temperature. They released some pretty cool pictures too.

I wrote articles about both events for astronomy.com. You can read the cluster story and the NICMOS story.

A personal note: it was very odd being in the NICMOS press conference. One of the people giving the conference is an old acquaintance of mine, so it felt weird to actually interview him. Weirder yet was that when I was still at Goddard Space Flight Center, I used to go see the NICMOS cooler while it was being built. It was hard to imagine at the time that the bizarre mechanism with pipes hanging off it every which-way was actually going into space. Now it's up there, and working. Wow.

Incidentally, I plan on writing one more article for astronomy.com, which will appear in a week or so. I may send out a newsletter when it goes live. Otherwise, check back on the my website's main page every couple of days to see what's what.

4) Subscribe/Unsubscribe Information

If, for some weird reason, you want to unsubscribe to this newsletter, just send email to badastronomy-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com with no body text. Make sure you send it from the address to which the newsletter is sent! Alternatively, you can unsubscribe from the Yahoo!Groups website. Go to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/groups/groups-32.html for more info.

Remember, the newsletters will be archived on the website at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/badastronomy so even if you unsubscribe you can still read them there. I suggest staying subscribed so you get them as soon as I send them.

Also, I do not sell your email addresses and neither does Yahoo! Take a gander at the Yahoo!Groups privacy message if it makes you feel better: http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy/us/ Note that the email addresses are visible to me, but I have no prurient use for them. If that makes you nervous for whatever reason, feel free to unsubscribe and simply read the archived newsletters at the website listed above.

Phil Plait
The Bad Astronomer
badastro@badastronomy.com
http://www.badastronomy.com