The Bad Astronomy Newsletter

Bad Astronomy Newsletter #31

Contents:

1. End of the year website, newsletter, and book news
2. Bad Astronomy in the news
3. "Under Alien Skies"
4. Bid on a night at the Keck 10 meter telescope
5. In Other News...
6. Subscribe/Unsubscribe info

1) End of the year website, newsletter, and book news

Just a quick note about the BA website, since it's the end of the year: I don't have access to accurate hit rates for the year on the Bad Astronomy site, but judging from the hits since September, the site received at least 2 million hits this year, and I suspect it may have been as much as twice that (due to several events that spiked the number of people coming to the site, like TV broadcasts and newspaper articles).

This is an amazing number to me, given that I started this site as a way to vent about a dumb newscaster talking about standing eggs on end on the spring equinox. My honest and sincere thanks to everyone out there who is interested in righting wrong astronomy. The newsletter has reached a subscription level of 3667 people, making it the second biggest astronomy letter on Yahoo!Groups.

Incidentally, in the near future I am hoping to archive all the newsletters on my own website, and even migrate the list to a different server, as I am unhappy with some of Yahoo's policies of late. I'll have more about this in a later newsletter. Also, my book, "Bad Astronomy", is still selling well, 9 months after I inflicted it on the world. It's in its fourth printing (with most mistakes from earlier printings corrected!) and has sold something like 20,000 copies, making it a moderately successful soft-cover science book. Its successor, "Bad Medicine" (written by Chris Wanjek) is doing fairly well here in the States, and doing very well in the UK.

My book gets minor boosts in sales whenever a news article about the Moon Hoax appears, giving me conflicting feelings about that. I have said it before, and some people are skeptical about my statements, but it's true: I'd happily trade the extra sales if this Moon Hoax idiocy would just go away. However, even I will admit that's an empty promise, as there is never an idea so silly that there won't be people out there ready to swallow it whole. Read item 2 below for more Moon Hoax Madness.

In the upcoming years I promise to continue the Good Fight! I expect things will get tough in the next few months as die-hard Planet X advocates make my life miserable. Their non-deadline of a May 2003 for an encounter with a planet which they say will destroy the Earth is moving inexorably closer, and the web buzz will no-doubt rise. However, I will continue to show folks "the man behind the curtain", and reveal those advocates for what they really are: wrong (read all about it). So keep reading, keep watching, and above all, keep thinking. The Bad Guys don't want you to think, because if you do, you'll see through them. So always be skeptical of what you hear, even (maybe even especially) from me.

THINK! BE SKEPTICAL! QUESTION WHAT YOU HEAR!

Always.

2) Bad Astronomy in the news

Well, in the couple of weeks since I last sent out a newsletter, there has been quite a bit of Bad Astronomy in the news, meaning both news about the abuse of astronomy, and some things I've been involved with (which, I hope, are good astronomy!).

Here's a brief rundown: The Moon Hoax: An article on the Moon Hoax appeared on space.com, which is affiliated with MSNBC and several other news outlets. The article has pretty much what you'd expect if you've been keeping up with the stories in the press about this nonsense. On the side of Truth, Justice and the American Space Program are Jim Oberg, Tom Hanks, NASA historian Roger Launius, Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell, and me (wow, I keep good company, at least in print!). On the side of Incorrectness, Jumping to Conclusions Without Being Encumbered by Facts, and Randomly Fired Potshots of Hot Air is Ralph Rene, whom regular readers may remember from the NPR interview back in November (see issue 29 for more on that).

Here are links to the article: http://www.space.com/news/oberg_hoaxes_021221.html
http://www.msnbc.com/news/848193.asp
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/12/22/moon.madness.ap/index.html

And before you ask (after you read the article), a calliope is the weird organ-like instrument used in a circus, and when I made that statement to the reporter I imitated one making the standard circus music. Judging from my email, no one knows what the heck I was doing. Oh well, some things don't translate well into print. ;-)

Selling Stars: I don't have anything on my website (yet) about the icky advertising practices of the International Star Registry, which used misleading tactics to sell people star names. They say you can buy a star name, and they will give you a certificate with the name on it. That much is true, but in years past they said things in their ads that were perhaps not quite as true, or were at least deceptive. This has lead to all sorts of unfortunate events, which I outlined in a chapter in my book ("Star Hustlers: Star Naming For Dummies").

I was interviewed about this by a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean a few weeks ago (which earlier in the year had a fun article about their local embarrassment, Moon Hoax guy Bart Sibrel). The article can be found here. You can read the truth about Star Naming here.

Good Astronomy: I sometimes moonlight (haha!) writing real astronomy news for various media. For Astronomy magazine's website I co-wrote an article with Vanessa Thomas about an asteroid on a weird Near-Earth orbit. Read all about it.

I'll also note that I wrote another feature article for the Boston Globe which should appear in the December 31st issue. The topic is dark matter, and unfortunately due to space limitations (haha again!) I couldn't cover the topic as thoroughly as I wanted: the length would have to have been about 5000 words, and would not have fit well on the front page of the science section. :-) So we kept it to just a recent discovery about filaments of matter permeating the Universe, and an observation which strengthens dark matter theories. When the Globe puts it online I'll link to it.

2) "Under Alien Skies"

Technically, this should be in the last section, but I want it to stand on its own: I wrote the cover feature article for the January 2003 issue of Astronomy Magazine. Titled "Under Alien Skies", it's a discussion of what some astronomical objects would really look like up close. Specifically, it's a look at the Orion Nebula, a red dwarf, and a globular cluster. The article also features artwork by renowned space artist Lynette Cook. The article is not online, so you'll have to pick up a copy of the magazine if you want to read it.

As it happens, there is an interesting history to this article, which would be way too long to print here. So, I wrote it up and put it on my website in the "In Print: Astronomy Magazine" section. You can see more of Lynette's artwork on her gorgeous website, and of course here is Astronomy's website.

4) Bid on a night at the Keck 10 meter telescope

If you have some spare cash, some free time, and a desire to hunt for planets orbiting other stars, then you might want to check this out: the Astronomical Society of the Pacific is auctioning off a chance to observe with planet-hunter Geoff Marcy on the monster Keck telescopes in Hawaii. The ASP is an old and highly-respected organization of professional and amateur astronomers, and they are doing this to raise money for society. This is a very cool opportunity, so take a look.

5) In Other News...

There has been quite a bit of other news lately as well. Some sad news first: Grote Reber, the pioneer of the field of radio astronomy, died late December at the age of 90. He was the first person to turn a radio receiver to the skies to "listen" to astronomical objects, and in doing so revolutionized the way astronomy was done. During a visit to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory site in Greenbank, West Virginia some years ago I saw his first telescope, which was the first radio telescope. The dish is only 10 meters across.

A short walk from there brings you to the Greenbank Telescope, a 100 meter wide fully-steerable dish (imagine a football field scooped up out of the ground, mounted on a steel platform and able to be swung around to point anywhere in the sky).  Things have come a long way since that day in the 1930s when Reber tried to figure out the origin of a radio background hiss detected by other scientists. Turns out he was hearing the center of the Galaxy... Read about Grote Reber here.

In more uplifting news, astronomers have used the Very Large Telescope array to measure the actual size of the disk of the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri. This is a major accomplishment, since the disk is about 1/1000th of an arcsecond across. The smallest object the human eye can resolve is 60,000 times larger than that! Even Hubble can only resolve objects down to about 0.1 arcseconds in diameter. Proxima turns out to be 1/7th the radius of the Sun, which is pretty much dead-on with predictions made using mathematical models of how stars work.

This is a major boost in the confidence of such models (which were already on pretty good ground). Proxima is classified as an M5 dwarf, which means it is very small and cool; shining at a measly 11th magnitude you need a decent telescope to see it at all, even though it's the closest star to our solar system! This feat of measurement was accomplished using interferometry, an extraordinarily complicated technique which combines the light detected by several telescopes. In the future, this technique will almost certainly allow astronomers to detect planets orbiting other stars, and will very certainly lead them to make discoveries we cannot as yet imagine. Here is the press release from the European Southern Observatory. I have written an essay on interferometry in my Bitesize pages too.

6) 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.

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