The Bad Astronomy Newsletter

Bad Astronomy Newsletter #9

Contents:

1. Media stuff: Local TV interview and Pax review
2. Today is the vernal equinox!
3. Bad Astronomy shop open
4. Astronomy Tidbit 1: More about the new comet
5. Astronomy Tidbit 2: Optical interferometry splits a triple
6. Subscribe/Unsubscribe info

1) Media stuff: Local TV interview and Pax review

For those in the north San Francisco Bay area, I will be interviewed on Channel 50 in Santa Rosa on Wednesday, March 20th at 8:40 a.m. I'll be doing the usual egg-standing stuff and shamelessly plugging the book. I know this is coming rather late, but really, how many of you are in Northbay? ;-) Also, yesterday I was interviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle about the website and book. That should run next week sometime, and I'll include a link in the next newsletter if they have one.

Last Sunday (March 17), Pax aired the "Encounters with the Unexplained" episode about the Moon hoax. Overall, I think the content was pretty good. They gave me more air time than I expected, and used all the material we taped! I re-wrote the script they gave me initially to make it more complete, fair, and accurate. The comments that I have received have been in general pretty good. My only complaint is that I think I sounded stilted. That's because I had to memorize my lines, and the director kept asking me to slow down. Oh well. I prefer live TV, and I'll be on Tech TV again next month. More on that in a future newsletter.

Anyway, in the end, I think Sibrel and Kaysing wound up sounding silly rehashing their tired arguments, which I refuted. Score one for the good guys!

2) Today is the vernal equinox!

At 19:16 Universal Time (2:16 p.m. Eastern US time) on March 20, 2002, the Sun crosses the celestial equator, heading north. This marks the time of the vernal (spring) equinox. The word "equinox" means equal day and night, but in reality the situation is more complicated. The air in our atmosphere bends the light from the Sun up when it is on the horizon, making daylight last longer. Also, the time of sunrise is measured when the upper limb of the Sun first peeks over the horizon, but sundown is when the upper limb disappears. This means the Sun has to cross more sky during the day (basically, twice its own diameter or one full degree), so the day is slightly longer than the night.

You can read more about this weird atmospheric effect. The times of the equinoxes from 1992-2005 can be found at the Naval Observatory site.

A brief description of the equinox can be found at http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/astronomy/Equinox.html and http://www.astronomynotes.com/nakedeye/s7.htm.

And since it's the vernal equinox, do you have your eggs ready? ;-) .

3) Bad Astronomy shop open

For a long time, I've wanted a mug with my logo on it. Now I can get it! CafePress is a nifty website that allows you to print t-shirts, hats, mugs and the like with whatever image you want. I got a friend who is a graphics artist to spiffy-up my logo, and it is available on shirts, mugs, a baseball hat and a mousepad.

The store is at http://www.cafepress.com/badastronomy.

I ordered the mug and shirt, and the quality is pretty good. The shirt logo has a faint outline to it, but it's not terribly noticeable (I just want to be fair and let people know).

4) Astronomy Tidbit 1: More about the new comet

I want to make sure people get a chance to see this amazing comet. Using binoculars is your best bet, since they afford a bit of magnification and allow you to see some fainter details. I was just informed that a website in the UK has some good info.

There are a couple of big pictures on the page (slow connection users beware!) but it's got some history of the comet, a chart to help you find it, and a lot of links to other webpages as well.

I saw it the other night, and it's spectacular. The tail was easily 6 degrees long. Get out and see it soon! The Moon is getting brighter, making the faint details of the tail harder to see. Again, to find it, try the Heaven's Above website.

5) Astronomy Tidbit 2: Optical interferometry splits a triple

Most people think that Hubble is the best telescope in the world, and by that they mean it can magnify images the most. That's not really a great definition for "best", but for now let's accept it. But it's still not true; Hubble is pretty good, but two recent advances have actually made it possible for ground-based telescope to surpass Hubble. One is called "adaptive optics". It lets the telescope adjust for air movement, negating the "twinkling" of starlight. I wrote about AO on one of my Bitesize pages.

The other advance is called "optical interferometry". I won't go into details, but you can read about it at the U.S. Naval Observatory website.

They posted a picture using their new interferometer..

Go ahead and look at that image. It shows a triple star system, with a double at the upper right corner and the third star to the lower left. Now look at the axes scales: the entire field of view is about 0.1 arcseconds on a side. What does this mean? Think of it this way: if one star were in the upper right corner, and one star in the lower left, Hubble would barely see them as two separate objects! Yet the interferometer clearly splits the two stars which are only 0.05 arcseconds apart, 20 times Hubble's ability!

The technology is still new, and Hubble still has many advantages over ground-based 'scopes. But this is very exciting, and will soon yield even more astonishing science.

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.

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