geminid meteor shower

this friday, december 14th, 2007, peaks the last and best meteor shower of the year!! start looking up late each night this week to see a few cosmic fireballs streaking across the sky, but friday night provides the best show! starting after 10pm, local time, look to the left of the constellation orion, toward mars and the constellation gemini. after midnight, you might be able to see a dozen "shooting stars" each hour... and the moon will be just past new so the sky will be dark!


astronomers first noticed the geminids (relatively recently) in 1862, but didnt realize their unusual origin until 1983. all other meteor showers are caused by earth passing through the dusty remains of a comet tail, as we saw for the orioids meteor shower in october. the geminids originate from earth's orbit passing thru a place in space where the near earth object, 3200 Phaeton, passed. this object is classified as an asteroid, which does not have the debris tails that cause comets to leave behind stuff that evaporates in earths atmosphere. here's an image of a comet (hale-bopp) and an (up close) asteroid (951 gaspra) so you can see the lack of loose stuff around an asteroid!




so what has happened to cause the geminids? the theory is a bit controversial, but many believe that 3200 Phaeton is the central rocky remains of what was once a comet! the orbit of 3200 phaeton is elliptical and passes very close to the sun, which are characteristics of comets, not asteroids. you can read more from NASA, but in the meantime... enjoy!!

(the first photo of the geminids was taken by Fred Bruenjes in 2004.)

indexed does washington

jessica hagy of indexed will be covering the US presidential election for McClatchy news service. pay attention here!

the arrow of time

why does time flow in one direction and not the other? why do we remember the past and not the future? how did our early universe have so many particles packed so tightly together in such a small volume? what initiated the burst of inflation very early in the existence of our universe? why/how was entropy lower in the early universe than it is now?

sean carroll at cosmic variance attempts to explain his understanding of the universe in terms we can all begin to discuss. he examines the arrow of time and other interesting topics in a way that makes your brain twist trying to understand how they all fit together! enjoy!

kite perspective

intersection of philip glass and sesame street

the music sounds similar to the collaborative work between philip glass and ravi shankar, called passages.

biggest mars for next 8 years!

as this is my last weekend to host the public star parties at the old telescope on UT's campus, i'm thrilled that mars is putting on such a show! mars doesnt look terribly exciting thru average telescopes most of the time it is visible in our sky, because it's far away from us in its orbit, it doesnt have big bright moons and it has no rings. but this month, on december 18th, mars appears bigger to us than it will be for the next 8 years!

being close means that mars appears brighter in our night sky, making it easier to find, and hopefully obvious to see for the next month once you get yourself acquainted! mars rises early in the evening in the east and then moves overhead and across the entire sky as the night goes by. to find it, face east in the evening and try to find the familiar constellation, orion, with three bright stars lined up almost vertically. move your eyes to the left and you'll notice two bright stars also aligned vertically, castor and pollux, of gemini. in between orion and the pair, castor and pollux, you'll see a bright orange point of light... closer to castor and pollux... thats mars!!


mars is not only brighter due to its closeness, it also appears bigger. our eyes cannot detect the size difference as easily as we notice its enhanced brightness level.... but looking thru a telescope will be more exciting because mars is almost 16 arcseconds across!

if you have a telescope, use it. if you don't, the look for astronomical societies in your town or see if the local university has public viewing nights or star parties!

once you are looking thru the eyepiece of a telescope at the image of the red planet, try to locate the white clouds covering the north polar ice caps. depending on the type of telescope, the "north pole" could be at the top or the bottom of your image. the image below shows mars as seen by Jean-Luc Dauvergne and Francois Colas a couple weeks ago in france.


a martian day is 40 minutes longer than a day on earth, so each week that you look at mars you'll see slightly different dark spots ("maria"), bright spots ("terrae") and cloud cover. sky and telescope has a nice mars finder application that shows the features of mars visible to us at any time! enjoy!

carnival of space #32

read many interesting articles about our solar system and space at large at the 32nd installement of the carnival of space hosted by the robot guy.

and a little comic holiday cheer...

hotel mauna kea

here's a clever and hilarious little video created by astronomers who regularly visit mauna kea, hawaii to use NASA's infrared telescope facility (IRTF). they created this parody of the song "hotel california" ... most likely while they were stuck killing time during a night of bad weather. they successfully capture the joy and frustrations of observing anywhere!


observing can be incredibly fun, but it's also challenging when your brain cant concentrate or think properly due to the lack of oxygen at high altitude. when things go wrong, computers break down or your data looks funky, it can get a little chaotic trying to figure out what the problem is! an additional challenge is that absolutely nothing is "standard" about operating any telescope anywhere! they are all unique beasts that get tweaked and adjusted over time so that they work! when you use one many times you get used to its methods and particular quirks, but of course these things change over time.

remember that this all assumes the weather is good enough to open the dome and observe the sky! when the roads are so bad, you cant even drive to the 14,000ft summit of mauna kea, you relax at hale pohaku where the dorm rooms are, at 9000ft. in the video they show some footage of an available time killer... the dart board! there's also a ping pong table and a good-as-can-be-expected pool table! they also highlight some other familiar scenes that many astronomers visit during their brief time off the mountain!

most observatories have a collection of games or things to entertain astronomers during bouts of bad weather.... there is the option to work uninterrupted thru the night, which sometimes is very nice... but i find that my brain shuts off after 2 am and i can no longer concentrate. so i get to know the astronomers using the other telescopes, drink a beer, play cards, read a book... it can be dangerous to try to solve an old puzzle sitting around because inevitably pieces have been lost over the years! observing is much more fun when the skies are clear!

results are coming in...

as job application deadlines continue to come and go, i sit patiently waiting for responses while finishing papers and writing my dissertation.

yesterday i received my first job offer. yippee!
this morning i received my first rejection letter. dud.

i'm still sending out applications, but i think i found a great job for which i'm definitely qualified ;) .... or not.

new horizons on jupiter and io

NASA recently shared with us this beautiful image taken by the pluto-bound new horizons spacecraft. the spacecraft flew by jupiter on Feb. 28, 2007, in order to use the large gas giant's gravitational field as a cosmic slingshot to the outskirts of our solar system. taking advantage of the closeness, folks at NASA spent time taking several images of of jupiter and its moons with the cameras on-board new horizons. below is a composite image of jupiter and the active moon, io.


the image feels so calm, and quiet, yet jupiters surface is completely covered in raging storms! the larger sphere of jupiter shows the complex layering of the clouds that cover the planets surface in horizontal bands. the big blue circle shows the biggest single storm on jupiters surface, more commonly known as the "great red spot." the worst hurricanes on earth last a couple weeks as they travel across the surface.... imagine that jupiters great storm has lasted hundreds of years!! different filters collect light of different wavelengths, which are shaded different colors in the picture in order to distinguish the physical representations on the surface of the planets. in this image, the red represents the deeper clouds, while the blue shows the upper layers.

the smaller orb in the image is jupiter's moon, io. io orbits closer to jupiter than our moon is to us and as a result, its the most volcanically active object in the entire solar system. the image of io was taken on March 1st 2007 and was created to represent the "true colors" of the moon as we would see them with our eyes. at the top of the moon, where the dark night persists, you can see the sun illuminating the blue tip a huge plume of smoke curving up from the 200-mile-high eruption rising above the volcano Tvashtar!! the red dot just below shows the flowing lava glowing in the darkness! new horizons detected at least 36 actively flowing volcanoes on io, glowing in the infrared.

DIY eggstractor

heres a clever mechanism to cleanly extract a hard boiled egg from it's shell! very nice.



DIY: Eggstractor - video powered by Metacafe
based on this hands-on demonstration...



Peeling Eggs - video powered by Metacafe

link

ugly christmas sweater contest winner

happy holidays, from the girl with the biggest... amount of courage... bliss. amazingly creative and hilarious!



it took me a while to notice her cute santa hat! hahaha!

new couch? naw...

inspired by his own comic....


... Randall Munroe of xkcd created his own ball pit!

"I was thinking of getting a couch or something for my room, somewhere for guests to lounge around. Fuck new couches. I now have a ball pit in my room."




pure awesome fun!

read about the details and the best way to create your own ball pit playground: here.

shrinking again, comet holmes

comet holmes is no longer the biggest thing in our solar system. the diffuse halo has shrunk back down and now spans half a degree in the sky, or about the same size as the full moon. take advantage of the currently moonless early evening sky to try to spot comet holmes.


the use of binoculars will greatly aid your ability to see comet holmes. here's an old finding chart in order for you to see the whole sky view, followed by a detailed views of how the comet is moving around the sky inside the constellation, perseus, for the next several months.




gary kronk shares the history of comet holmes, here, including some great photos of the burst stages since the initial outburst in late october.

sounds from saturn

NASA has released sounds of saturn recorded by the cassini-huygens mission. the radio emissions from saturn are closely related to the auroras near the poles of the planet so they are related to the planet's magnetic fields.


scientists did some messing around with the radio emissions recorded from saturn so that they are actually audible to the human ear. listen here

as space.com points out, saturn sounds an awful lot like the 1956 science fiction movie Forbidden Planet.

the pleasure of finding things out

richard feynman's precocious existence kept his colleagues and enthusiasts of physics intrigued for many decades! he was well-known as one of the best lectures ever recorded.

he won the nobel prize in physics in 1965 for the Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics.

i read his auto-biography, surely you're joking, mr. feynman! it's quite entertaining, but i wouldnt call it a "page-turner." as an undergrad physics major, i was much more mesmerized by his 3-volume series called lectures on physics.

below is an inspiring video of an interview with feynman that shares intuitive view on his life and how he came to be a physics nobel laureate. this is rather long video at 50 minutes, but it's completely absorbing from the very start. at least watch the first 2 minutes about the beauty of a flower! he then discusses lessons he learned from his father as a child, his involvement with creating the atomic bomb in the 1940's, winning the nobel prize and how much he doesnt care about honors, his understanding of quantum mechanics, why he's actively irresponsible, his (lack of) theory of teaching.... and i really enjoy the last couple minutes...


you can also listen to, and watch extended physics lectures about quantum mechanics, here.... they're quite good as well! he creates wonderful analogies that make very difficult mathematical results feel attainable!

a feynman quote i've always enjoyed.... "physics is like sex. sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it."

he's worked his way into popular culture....


feynman also truly understood that regardless of what you work hard to accomplish in your life... you need to have fun... and have orange juice!

hiking in the swiss alps

this is a video i made last fall after my visit to switzerland. i stayed in the small town of gimmelwald, hiked to the alpen peak of schilthorn, and also some glacial ice caves along the valley. if you ever pass thru, i recommend the mountain hostel!

books of 2007

of the NY Times 100 notable books of 2007, i have read one: harry potter and the deathly hallows.

i admit that it hasnt been a great year for me to finish books. living in new locations causes me to explore as much as possible instead of snuggling up with a good book.

i'm reading a good novel right now, but i have nothing on deck and no ideas either.... can anyone suggest something for me to read? i'm not picky about genre or author or topic or anything. what are your favorite books and what should i absolutely, positively read without hesitation?!? thanks!


image: Real Gabinete Portugues De Leitura Rio De Janeiro, Brasil
via: curious expeditions

crayon physics

cool computer toy for kids of all ages.


crayon physics - Watch more free videos

tip to zefrank

mars approaches

mars has doubled its brightness over the last month, and will continue to get brighter as earth and mars move close together in their orbits. mars will continue to get brighter until december 18th when earth and mars are at their closest distance... 55 million miles! to take advantage of this closeness, NASA launched the Phoenix Lander this past august, which will finally reach mars in may 2008.

you can spot the moon in the constellation, gemini, rising in the east in the early evening. monday night, nov 26, look for mars and our moon to be very close together in the sky! enjoy!

beware the shopocalypse

the annual holiday shopocalypse is nigh upon us.

i refuse to go to malls because i have no patience for them and they put me in a bad mood. and i strongly dislike commercial consumerism, in general, but i do enjoy giving gifts to my family and friends to remind them that i love them. i think that gifts created by your very own hands are always the most cherished! but for the busiest among us.... i've compiled a quick list of good places to shop that benefit real life human artisans from all over the world:

ten thousand villages
a greater gift
home grown market
sweat free online consumer guide
co-op america
global exchange
stars and infinite darkness


there might be a trailer for the movie "what would jesus buy" posted below, but if not: view it here

still expanding comet holmes

wow!!! has anyone else seen comet holmes look the way Peter von Bagh saw it in this photo? i'm not sure how long he exposed this image for, but he didnt use a telescope....


APOD also has a nice picture today taken with the big 3.6-meter canada-france-hawaii telescope on mauna kea in hawaii. it's neat how you can see far away stars thru the envelop of dust and gas that has formed and expanded around the nucleus of the comet. this envelop is called a "coma."


speaking of expanding gas... astronomers in hawaii have shown that the volume puffy gas ball that is now comet holmes, is bigger than the sun!!! they report that since the initial explosion seen from comet holmes on october 24 (for reasons we still don't fully understand), the gas has continued to expand and push outwards at a steady pace of 0.5 km/sec (1100 mph)! that's some quick moving gas! now the gas extends in space with a diameter of 1.4 million kilometers (0.9 million miles) as of november 9, 2007, making it the single largest object in our solar system. holy crap!!! that was unexpected! you can see and image of saturn next to the sun for some scale, and also consider that you can fit 100 earths next to each other across the image of the sun!


thats a big comet!

nice nearness

this friday night, there will be a nice nearness between the nearly full moon and the pleaides star cluster (see star map here). some people in the northern part of the world will see the moon pass right in from of the pleiades, occulting the tiny little dipper!

unnecessary *things*

most of the "things" that we buy with our hard-earned money, are absolutely not necessary. we buy them just to buy them. we consume beyond our needs. why is that?

when i returned to the US, i unpacked all the stuff i had in storage, that i hadnt used or even thought about in an entire year. these were the items i felt worthy to save for the year i was gone... things that i thought i would really need when i got back.

and then i found the mold. nearly everything that i saved was covered in a fine blue-green powdery mold that grew in my absence (i now recognize the benefit of climate-controlled storage facilities)! after a couple weeks of fighting back against the mold, i gave up and just started throwing things away.

i worked very hard to clean and save childhood mementos, photo albums, and all the journals i started keeping in 3rd grade. certain things i'm having to replace, like camping equipment and some clothes, but i have ultimately felt liberated by getting rid of so much stuff!

part of the problem is the endless advertising to which we are subjected. a person living in a modern city sees 5,000 ad messages a DAY! absolute sensory overload as our eyes meet potential products to buy instead of earth's natural beauty.

thats why i'm very excited to learn about the anti-advertising agency! this agency and Packard Jennings took a poll of residents around the oakland area to find out "what advertising tactics they found most bothersome in their neighborhoods." in response, they created clever anti-advertising artwork for bus stop benches! brilliant!!



fine print: i say all this as my blog flashes google ads along the side. i recognize this hypocrisy, and i'm thinking about it....

conversations with astrophysicists

phd comics hoy dia:


the first row mini-comic-within-a-comic is oh so true. i'll also add that if i really want to impress someone with the intention of continuing the conversation, i throw out that "i'm an astrophysicist." although i've learned that this can backfire if too many alcoholic beverages are consumed because there's the potential to say "i'm an astro-phythithistht."

interesting how this comic mentions the concept of a theory of everything, and the astrophysics grad student character, katie, remains more enthusiastic about the possibility than i do!

writers not on strike

hillary clinton should give a bonus to which ever of her speech writers came up with this gem that made me laugh out loud today:

"It takes a Clinton to clean up after a Bush."

maybe she came up with this line herself, i dont know... but i think its funny no matter where your opinions may lie along the political spectrum.

its beautiful all the way down

today's phd comic:



good summary of observing: "you spend night after night in isolation, not wasting one minute, checking on the equipment as photons from stars billions of miles away and millions of years old impinge upon your calibrated CCD sensors, hoping they carry data good enough for a thesis."

as it turns out, i've spent over 4 months worth of nights at telescopes during my grad school tenure and very few of the photons i collected will appear in my final dissertation! haha (more of an sad/evil laugh, really)! thats ok though, i loved nearly every minute and gained a lot of knowledge during those long, cold nights on mountain tops.

another theory of everything

according to the surfer physicist, Garrett Lisi, 42 is not the answer to life, the universe, and everything. dud. but he has just submitted a theory for peer review with the deceivingly light title, "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything."

its exciting that someone with such a non-traditional physics career is getting so much attention for what seems to be a very interesting theory! but i have a small problem with calling something a "theory of everything" when only a small handful of highly educated human beings can understand it well enough to discuss it. i know life and the universe are both very complicated and should probably require a complicated theory to explain them... but it's a telling sign when a leading theoretical cosmologist, stated that he wont even bother reading and trying to fully understand this paper... just yet.


a worthy attempt to explain how this new theory fits into the current standard model of particle physics can be found at the backreaction blog. i admit that i dont understand the finer points, but i think the visualization of E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points - is beautifully fascinating! view e8rotation here.

i hope that gives you enough references to go read about this theory, if you want.

exploring lava tubes

today is my last day in hawaii :( i leave this afternoon to head back to austin, where i arrive tomorrow! long travel day/night. it's been a productive trip... and a lot of fun too!

monday was a holiday, so some of the astronomers here took me on an adventure hiking thru some remote lava tubes! we walked about 2 miles across lava fields, found a tiny hidden entrance to the caves, and then hiked in for about a mile... it's hard to judge distance underground, so who knows how far we went!

most of the lava inside the caves had a sparkly, silver tone, but sometimes there were flows of bright orange or red! cool stuff!









many parts of the cave were split into 2 levels. here you can see a huge fallen chunk of lava! that sort of sight kept me constantly looking for big cracks or potential lava flows from the end of the cave!!




cave poop....




there were a couple rooms in the cave with ceilings covered by these crazy lava stalactite things! they didnt hang straight down either, but rather at distinct, yet uniform angles!

pleiades - the tiny little dipper

i've always thought of the blue cluster of stars called the pleaides ("plee-uh-deez") as the little tiny dipper, but it also goes by many many other names... Messier 45 (M45), the seven sisters, subaru (ever notice the japanese car, subaru's logo?), Tzab-ek (to the mayans who planted their crops by the rise of the cluster), Makali‘i (to hawaiians who used the star cluster to determine the new year), etc... you can read much more about the ancient folklore surrounding the pleiades here and/or here.



i heard a story from greek mythology when i was growing up, that the great hunter, orion, fancied all 7 of the pleiads sisters, but was forbidden to court any of them by zeus. to prevent the courtship, zeus transformed the sisters into birds and sent them off to the heavens. when orion died, zeus placed him behind the seven sisters in the sky to eternalize his chase. i have since seen a couple variations of this story and who knows if my memory is actually what i heard!

this image is from a maori theatre group

the pleiades star cluster contains over 1000 stars! All these stars formed from the same big cloud of gas, about 100 million years ago. now, they are all gravitationally bound together, orbiting around each other. the cluster is about 400 light years away from earth, and it's only 13 light years across.

now... onto the pretty pictures! i really like this picture that i found at the orbiting frog blog showing M45 in various wavelengths of light, from top left to bottom right... radio, microwave, near-infrared, visible, ultraviolet and x-ray.


the small green squares in the bottom right image from the orbiting ROSAT satellite show the locations of the brightest blue stars we see with our eyes and the hubble space telescope (HST). next is a more detailed image from HST showing optical light. the bright vertical and horizontal lines coming out of the brightest stars are called diffraction spikes and result from light bouncing off the internal structure of the telescope.



you can also think about this as youre gazing up at the pleiades star cluster... astronomers just announced the discovery of planet embryos colliding together within the cluster! this is a tough event to actually observe, so these are very exciting results!

below is a color composite image of the pleiades star cluster by Inseok Song of the Spitzer Science Center. the image was created by combining images from different types of optical wavelengths... blue, green and red images. the location of the star, HD 23514, with the orbiting planetesimals, is shown by the yellow arrow. the inset artwork is by Lynette Cook for Gemini Observatory.


read more at universe today.