jupiter's opposition, the equinox, and the full moon

tomorrow is the equinox, which means that the hours of daylight and darkness are very nearly equal. welcome to a new season (and hopefully lots of colorful leaves in the trees in ohio when i visit next week!).

the next few evenings will also be lovely for looking towards the sky. maybe you've noticed an incredibly bright object shining in eastern skies over the last couple months? that's the planet jupiter. wednesday, the harvest moon will be full, and the brightly shining, nearby jupiter will be hanging in the sky just below it.


last night jupiter was at opposition (when the earth passes between the sun and jupiter), constituting jupiter's closest physical approach to us on earth! every earth year, jupiter goes thru an opposition position, but its physically a little closer or farther each time. this time, it happens to be closer than it has been since 1963 and closer than it will be again until the year 2022, and as such, it looks especially bright in our sky! the jovian giant is about 368 million miles away.

you can see below how the planets of our solar system are currently aligned (the map is not to scale).


earth is just to the right of the sun, and you can see jupiter in a straight line farther out to the right. even farther out is the planet uranus. in fact, if you look to the upper left of jupiter in the (northern hemisphere's) sky with the aid of binoculars or a small telescope, you should easily be able to spot uranus, and maybe even the 4 galilean moons of jupiter! from the southern hemisphere, you'll find uranus to the lower left of jupiter.

be sure to go out, take a look, take a picture, and enjoy the changing of the seasons.

dirty space news: jets at all scales

i did not attend this conference myself, but a fellow astrophysicist pointed out to me that the poster for a recent IAU symposium obviously fits the criteria for being dirty space news:


its just an added bonus that they called the meeting jets at all scales.

astro timelapse montage

i cant get enough of these landscape and sky-based timelaspe films! this one comes from mike flores on vimeo.

Timelapse Montage from Mike Flores on Vimeo.

microscopic booze

a researcher at the university of florida shares some images of various types of booze, magnified about 1000 times (i think). so what does booze looks like under a microscope?

my favorite is white russian, which also happens to be a drink i very much like.


it looks like a painting by wassily kandinsky.

i also like the microscopic image of vodka, which appears to be much different even though vodka is a component of a white russian.

answers from sixty symbols: part 2

brady asked for my favorite symbol.... it has always been the same! watch below for more answers from your questions to the scientists of sixty symbols.



the answers: part 1.

the endocrine system

this image comes from a book called the human body - what it is and how it works, illustrated by cornelius de witt and published in 1959.


prof. michael stoll offers 200 images from the book in a nice flickr set.

(via fresh photons)

the ANSWERS from sixty symbols

you asked questions and they were good. here is the first video of our answers:

four-leaf clovers

for some reason i've always had a talent for finding four-leaf clovers. i have no idea why.

while walking across the neighborhood to a friend's house when i was young, i glanced down and thought i saw, among the grass and clovers, a four-leaf clover! i stopped, took a slow step backwards, leaned down hopefully, and found it again!! i was so excited when i confirmed my find that i could hardly believe that just next to it... was another!?! woah!! then i saw another and another and another.... and wondered if i had found the luckiest patch of clovers on earth? i collected all the four-leaf clovers i could find in that little patch and ran back home to show my mom (and to show off to my sister ;)


during the summers of my childhood, i regularly brought home piles of not only four-leaf clovers, but five-leaf and six-leaf clovers as well! the four-leaf clovers were always more abundant than the five-leaf clovers, which were more numerous than the six-leaf clovers. i found a few seven-leaf clovers, but i don't remember ever finding an eight-leaf. apparently the world record is a 21-leaf clover!!

there's something about the abnormal symmetry of the four-leaf clover that is unique enough that my eyes seem to spot it instantly, even amid a huge patch of three-leaf clovers. i always thought, even as a kid, that i was finding the clovers with genetic aberrations, and wondered why it was only this particular genetic irregularity that we commonly consider "lucky."

the first time i observed with a big hands-on telescope, i recognized the benefit of my peculiar talent. a telescope is not usually pointing exactly where you want it to point at the beginning of the night. you have to adjust its position slightly in order to align it to exactly the correct coordinates. you usually have a reference image taken previously from some other telescope in the world, and then you take an image with your telescope and try to match the patterns found in the stars of each image until you find matching patters and can digitally nudge your telescope. depending on the instrument, you could be comparing two images with different orientations, rotations, flips, and/or flops.

the first time i had to do this, i found the process fascinating. i noticed that i was pretty good at the pattern matching bit and realized i had finally found a practical use for my four-leaf-clover-pattern-finding ability!

the point of all this is that i havent found many four-leaf clovers in the UK since i moved here two years ago. i've started wondering whether the four-leaf phenomenon is as environmental as it is genetic, because there are certainly lots of clover patches around here! i dont really know enough about biology to give any more information, but i do know that recently i've been finding a lot more four-leaf clovers in the UK, as you can see in the image above that i took in england's lake district!

i decided to leave that one growing in the ground for someone else to find again. good luck!

england's lake district

a couple weeks ago i drove to england's lake district with some friends. the drive was gorgeous, if a bit strenuous for the vehicle!


obviously, lakes are plentiful.




another strikingly abundant feature of much of the british countryside is stone walls. they seem to meander randomly around many areas i've explored and are even identified on ordinance survey maps indicating places where crossings have been constructed!


the presence of the walls has something to do with the enclosure acts that started in the mid 1700s requiring farmers to enclose their fields. over 5000 acts of parliament were passed which covered almost 7 million acres of land, enclosing about 21% of england!


the greenest grass ever?



amazingly, the weather was pleasant throughout the entire weekend, but i must admit that plentiful showers bring lovely flowers!


we ended the weekend with a bit of fun at the beach!


"nottn'm woz 'ere"

black holes are out of sight!

i know this photo is classified as an "awkward family photo" and all, but i kinda want that shirt!


spotted at fresh photons

temporal gallery

this month's gallery for the royal observatory greenich's astronomy photographer of the year challenge was chosen by stuart, who writes the astronomy blog.

my favorite from his temporal gallery was this photo by thierry legault. aside from the necessary timing and technical skills required to capture the ISS just as it passes in front of the sun, the foresight to catch the ISS with the shuttle atlantis docked (on the left) is brilliant! this was the final space flight for atlantis before it was retired.


the clarity of the silhouette is stunning.

fly to the moon

dangerous dive

this picture made my heart jump. it looks so exciting and refreshing and scary that it made me instantly anxious.


then i noticed the dark thing in the photo appearing to have jumped just after the long-haired man in sri lanka, and wondered if he had a pet mouse that simply couldnt live without him? unfortunately, i couldnt get any more information from the caption at the big picture.

constrained ball

while its true that the name is unfortunate, this innovation is certainly very clever. the "constrained ball" is a drawing aid created by korean designer giha woo. you attach it to a pen and are then able to draw straight lines across a whole page without accidentally crossing out the neighboring couple lines, inevitably, by accident!


the downside is that you have to be using a flat surface for the constrained ball to produce a strait line, and i find i get a lot of paper reading accomplished on the bus these days, or leaning back in my chair with my feet up.

sixty symbols: asteroids

there has been quite an excited buzz around the internet about the recent video showing asteroid discovery from 1980 to 2010. what you gain from watching is that there are LOTS of asteroids out there, which is "cool and mildly terrifying" as a friend so succinctly described it.

it just so happens that sixty symbols released a video describing asteroids today which describes, ironically, why individual asteroids are no longer given unique symbols.

castles in north wales

here are some photos from a trip to wales i took in the spring. the focus of this trip was to see old castles, but we stoppen in Llangollen...


and saw this interesting aqueduct.


we visited conwy castle in nothern wales....


we didnt enter this one, but we walked around the wall that still surrounds the city.




we found the smallest house in great britain! the last occupant was 6 ft 3 and named robert jones. the tiny flat was condemned in the early 1900s, but when the tall man got kicked out, he traveled around great britain to visit all the small houses to verify that his was indeed the smallest.


a mere 20 miles south of conwy, is the massive caernarfon castle, which translates to carnarvon ("car-NAR-von") in english, if that makes the pronunciation any easier!








a small bit of the welsh language.

silent star wars

i'm almost more impressed by the piano composition than the silent movie bit, but its still worth a quick watch...

bad universe on TV!

phil plait, aka the bad astronomer, has a tv show on the discovery channel!! so if youre in the US, tune in this sunday night at 10pm.

here's a description of the episode: "65 million years ago, an asteroid bigger than Mount Everest slammed into the Earth wiping out the dinosaurs. Are we in for the same fate? Phil Plait investigates the possibility and tests some explosive measures that may just save our planet."

and here's a preview:



i'm excited for this opportunity for phil and i'm thrilled that he gets to share his enthusiasm and knowledge on TV for the masses! let me know what you think!

Sixty Symbols: you ask the questions!

the 100th video for the sixty symbols project will be filmed soon! the filmmaker, brady, is asking for you all to submit questions that he can ask us - without us knowing the questions beforehand! i like his advice: don't ask something that you could look up in a textbook or on the internet... see if you can be creative and ask questions we've never been asked before!

i admit, i'm moderately terrified by this idea, but certainly excited to see what you come up with! eek!

you can submit questions directly to brady at sixtysymbols [at] hotmail.co.uk or you can ask me a question in the comments if you want!

laser cooling

did you know you could cool a gas with lasers? this sixty symbols video explains the process...

(i didnt know there was such an intricate laser system here at the university of nottingham!)

(also, the last line of this video is great ;)

this is how you lock a gate

all across england and wales, there are public footpaths that are available for walking. i felt strange at first walking across someone's meadow where sheep are eating grass just meters away, but people have even built steps to help you over fences and walls that you might come across during your walk. these footpaths only apply to walkers (and "bridleways" that also allow cyclists and people on horseback), but i was still surprised to see this heavily-locked gate as we walked through the lake district in northwest england!

what the flux?

click image to embiggen...


via buzzfeed