The Bad Astronomy Newsletter

Bad Astronomy Newsletter #22 Contents:

1. Ask Yahoo! and Bad Bad Astronomy
2. The Amazing Meeting: coming soon!
3. One Ring Galaxy to Rule Them All
4. Top 5 Misconceptions and a bit of book news
5. Subscribe/Unsubscribe info

1) Ask Yahoo! and Bad Bad Astronomy

I received an email from a Bad Reader alerting me that the Yahoo Q&A page called Ask Yahoo! had a link to Bad Astronomy. I went to the page, and sure enough, it was about why stars twinkle. It started off well enough, but then said something really wrong.

Stars twinkle because little cells of air in the Earth's atmosphere pass between us and the star. These cells bend the light of the star, making it dance around. The cells are small, about 10 or so centimeters across. This part is all correct. However, the Ask Yahoo! page said the cells were a few centimeters across and "kilometers high". Yikes! They aren't long, thin cylinders, they're little blobs.

I emailed the folks at Ask Yahoo!, and they promptly replied, saying they got this off my very page! Figuring they had screwed up, I went to my page about stars twinkling, and immediately found the problem: me. Yup, I had a sentence in there that had a misplaced modifier. I originally said the cells of air were "centimeters across and kilometers high". The first part was about their size, the second about their location. But I had phrased it poorly, and the Ask Yahoo! people simply copied what I said. I apologized to them, fixed my page, and put a note on the bottom saying I am a bonehead sometimes. Here are the links: My twinkling page, and Ask Yahoo!

My thanks again to Bad Reader Jerry, whom I can literally say is a close friend, for pointing this out to me in the first place.

2) The Amazing Meeting: coming soon!

I have been a fan of magician and professional debunker/skeptic James "The Amazing" Randi ever since I saw him perform "psychic surgery" on The Tonight Show back in the 1980s. He has made a career of exposing charlatans, frauds, con artists and the like. I called him last year to ask if he would write a short blurb for my book's back cover, and when he agreed I was ecstatic. He has a great website and a bulletin board I frequent; matter of fact, the regulars there helped me answer a caller's question when I was on the radio one night.

Anyway, Randi is holding a convention in January next year. It's a skeptic convention, with guests including Michael Shermer (head of the Skeptic Society, author, writer, etc.), Jack Horkheimer (yes, the Star Hustler, famed for his five minute PBS bits showing what's up in the sky; he is now calling himself The Stargazer) and, you guessed it, l'il ole me. I was overwhelmed to be invited, and very happy to go. I'll be giving a talk about Planet X, and why it doesn't exist so it can't kill us all next May.

The Amazing Meeting will be from January 31 - February 2, 2003 in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. You can read all about it at Randi's site. I'll definitely have more info as the time approaches.

3) One Ring Galaxy to Rule Them All

The Hubble Space Telescope is renowned for taking beautiful images of celestial objects. The Heritage Project was started to make sure that these images get to the public. Sometimes, an astronomer will get great images, but only wants to do science with them, and not create a gorgeous images (astronomers can be fuddy-duddies sometimes). The Heritage people take the images and prettify them. Sometimes they even use Hubble to take images themselves, or take a third image of an object where only two were taken originally by the scientists (you need three images to make a "true color" image).

These images are released one at a time, on the first Thursday of every month. For September, 2002, they put up a picture of Hoag's Object (pronounced "Hoe Ag"), a fantastic ring galaxy. Evidently it suffered a massive collision with another galaxy, and the interaction of gravitational forces molded the galaxy into a giant hoop over a hundred thousand light years across.

What's even cooler is that the image was processed by a young woman named Tiffany Borders. With the original Hubble images, she combined several software packages and her own skill and made this month's beautiful image. What's remarkable is that she is only 20 years old, and an undergraduate at Sonoma State University! Yes, the same SSU where I am. Matter of fact, she's a part of the same team I am on, creating educational products based on NASA satellites.

If this weren't enough, I'll mention that she was only an intern on the Heritage project, and put that image together after being with the project a few short weeks! Clearly, she learned a lot over there at the Space Telescope Science Institute, and our whole team here at SSU is proud of her. We're also glad to get her back!

Here is the link to the Heritage Project, and to the page with Ms. Border's Hoag's Object image. Here is a blurb the Heritage project put up about Ms. Borders.

4) Top 5 Astronomy Misconceptions and a bit of book news

First, some book news: my editor called me the other day to let me know that Wiley and Sons decided to put my book into a fourth printing! So 5000 more copies will be hitting the streets sometime in the next couple of months. The best news is that it gave me a chance to fix a few of the remaining errors in it. If you spot them, you don't win a prize except the warm smug knowledge that even science authors can be boneheads sometimes. But if you read the first item in this newsletter you already knew that. You can get more info about the book on my book page.

Second, I wrote a short, breezy article for Space.com called "Top 5 Cosmic Myths", and it was published on their site on September 3. I guess their site is pretty popular; the hitrate for my site has gone up by a factor of 5 since the story went live! You can read the article at the space.com website. It was picked up by MSNBC as well.

I have received a lot of email from people supporting me, and even more from people who thought I picked the wrong misconceptions for the Top 5. To the latter, I say that there are enough misconceptions to go around, and what the heck, I can always write more articles.

5) Subscribe/Unsubscribe Information

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