The Bad Astronomy Newsletter

Bad Astronomy Newsletter #6 Contents:

1. The Book Is Out!
2. Astronomy Tidbit: Hubble Gets a New Camera
3. Subscribe/Unsubscribe info

1) The Book Is Out!

I am extremely pleased to announce that my book "Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing 'Hoax'" is now available!

After three years of writing, editing, emailing, phoning, more editing, begging, editing, and then waiting, the book is now released by publisher Wiley and Sons. It will be in bookstores soon, or you can order it right now on amazon.com, where it should ship quickly. You can order it from my own bookstore where you can save a few bucks on the retail price, and I make an extra buck or so on the copy. ;-)

I have been burning up my phone line trying to arrange speaking engagements all over the country. I will add them to my calendar as I find out more. Check it out every so often to find out what's new.

Let me know what you think of the book! You can email me, or join the Bad Astronomy Bulletin Board.

2) Astronomy Tidbit: Hubble Gets a New Camera

As I write this, the Space Shuttle Columbia is due to launch tomorrow, Friday March 1, at 6:22 a.m. (ET) to rendezvous with the Hubble Space Telescope. This mission to service Hubble will make all sorts of major upgrades. The three biggies are to install new solar panels, a new camera, and a cooler for an old camera.

Hubble was designed to be periodically upgraded. Sometimes parts wear out, and often technology improves dramatically over the lifetime of the mission. For example, the new solar panels are much smaller than the ones on board now, but are so much more efficient that they actually provide more power for the telescope.

The new camera, called the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), will be a big improvement for Hubble. It sees nearly twice the area on the sky as the Wide Field/Planetary Camera-2 (WFPC2, the one that makes the images with the stepladder of Stealth bomber shape), as well as being more sensitive. If you liked the WFPC2 images, you'll love the ACS images.

The cooler is for NICMOS, the Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer. It is sensitive to infrared light, and must be kept cold. The coolant ran out after less than two years in orbit, and NICMOS had to be turned off. The new cooler runs on electricity, so if all goes well NICMOS will be up and running again. One major goal of NICMOS is to look for brown dwarfs and giant planets around nearby stars. I was involved in this project before I switched from a research career to public outreach, so I am very excited about this and cannot wait to see the data coming in again.

There are many websites with info about this servicing mission. An excellent one is http://sm3b.gsfc.nasa.gov/intro.html which is all about the mission, and has a link to a webcam at the launch site! It is a sister site to a more general Hubble site.

You can also find the latest on the launch at http://www.space.com and if you just want to stare at Hubble's images, try http://hubble.stsci.edu/gallery/.

3) Subscribe/Unsubscribe Information

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