Lately have been using this image as my desktop background:

It is an image I took with Celestia two years ago and, coming across again, seemed like good background material.

The main object in the foreground is of course Europa, mostly eclipsing Jupiter in the background. To the left is the Sun, and to the left of that another disk is visible. I recreated this shot in Celestia recently to verify (the time displayed in the image is local to Sydney, so I had to adjust the clock settings in Celestia to get to the right moment, but if you leave them unaltered and enter the time shown you get a shot which is nearly a mirror image of this one) that the other disk visible is indeed Io and not one of the other Galilean moons.

I think it is wonderful that there are places in the solar system we could go and see more than two objects visible in the sky as more than points.

Filter: happy

• There weren't ads insisting it were really possible and could happen


• The plot weren't an annoying apocalyptic myth going around for years already


• And if astronomers and others weren't having to reassure terrified people that the end of the world is not imminent, thanks partly to the film's advertising

Filter: annoyed

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

In the past week I have been surprised by two pieces of news concerning Saturn and rings.

First, from the Planetary Society Blog: findings which might be evidence for a posited ring around Rhea. As described in that article, a series of equatorial spots on Rhea bright in ultaviolet light might be evidence of collisions from ring particles orbiting the moon. These particles, if they exist, would occupy a size and distribution which makes them particularly difficult to detect visually directly with the instruments we currently have available.

It seems the idea of rings around Rhea has been around longer than I have been aware of. Apparently they were originally proposed to explain a decreased electron flux in the vicinity of Rhea back in 2005, and I sure didn't realise there was this much evidence already. Would be very exciting indeed to get a direct and definite confirmation about this.

Sadly given how difficult these rings are proving to image, it is unlikely there will ever be beautiful views of the Rhean ringscape. We shall just have to comfort ourselves with the knowledge of something wonderful.

The other news is the discovery of a new ring around Saturn itself. This one, discovered by the Spitzer Space Telescope, is the largest and most diffuse planetary ring yet discovered. The details can be found in this press release. Basically it is very large and very faint, and only detected because of its cool infrared glow. I am concerned that the end of the release specifies this information was gathered before Spitzer ran out of coolant, and whether this means we won't be able to obtain further observations of the ring for a while. It might take us a long time to discover if this ring 'only' spans from six to twelve million kilometres from Saturn, or if that were merely its brightest, densest part.

Apart from the amazement of a whole new feature being discovered, this is particularly intriguing because Saturn's moon Phoebe orbits within this ring and is thought to be the source of its material (via dust knocked off from impacts, most likely). If so, and depending on what else is found, this ring could be a key part of one of astronomy's longer-standing mysteries: the two faces of Iapetus. Although it has long been suspected that material from Phoebe deposited on Iapetus is the reason that moon has one bright hemisphere and one dark (more or less), I think this ring is the first actual detection of a possible mechanism for the transfer of this material.

If that bears out I think I will finally have an answer to a mystery I have been intrigued by since I was a young child; for a long time Iapetus has been one of the solar system bodies I was most fascinated by.

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

Last week seems to have been a good week for news in astronomy. At the least of the sorts that capture my especial interest.

From Universe Today, Spot Discovered On Haumea Rich With Organics And Minerals.

Haumea, one of those planets called dwarfs, is notable for its extremely rapid rotation (a bit less than four hours) distorting its shape well out of spherical and its pair of moons (and the origin of those moons being a probable collision early in Haumea's history which stripped much of its mantle and originated the Haumea collision family). I was thrilled to see such a headline, although on further reading of the article it seems a touch premature:

Possible interpretations of the changes in the light curve are that the spot is richer in minerals and organic compounds, or that it contains a higher fraction of crystalline ice.

So although it appears there is a dark patch on Haumea's surface, we won't know its composition until next year at the earliest. Still, I'm excited to learn just about any new details about these worlds.

Via the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia (currently 374 planets and counting), a preprint of a paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal: The Formation Mechanics of Gas Giants on Wide Orbits.

Presently there are two major theories concerning the formation of giant planets. The core accretion model holds that if a planetesimal can accumulate at least ten Earth masses before the gas of the surrounding protostellar disk dissipates, it will be able to rapidly accumulate a massive envelope of gas. Meanwhile the disk instability model proposes giant planets form when part of the disk becomes unstable and collapses in on itself like a version in miniature of how stars form from giant molecular clouds.

For a while now the core accretion model appears to have prevailed, I think largely because the two models produce different sorts of planets with only a bit of overlap, and most of the planets we have been finding so far suit the core accretion model far better. That is, planets with up to a few times the mass of Jupiter, on orbits less than 10 - 20 AU (Astronomical Units) from their host star.

This paper reminds that there are now planets being found which the disk instability model explains far better than the alternatives - more massive planets approaching the realm of brown dwarves, on orbits too distant for core accretion to have produced them in situ, with orbital dynamics suggesting they were unlikely to have arrived there by scattering from interactions with other planets.

After reading it, I would not be surprised of Fomalhaut b did turn out to originate from core accretion and scattering, but I think they are probably right about the planets of HR 8799 and that there are many more such systems to be found. Would be very interested to learn if there are inner planets to these systems yet undiscovered, and what happens when both planetary formation modes are at work in the same system.

Another quick bit from Universe Today: Smallest Exoplanet Yet Has Rocky Surface. CoRoT-7 b may not turn out to be the smallest planet orbiting an actively fusing star yet discovered, but it is the one with the lowest mass we are currently sure of. The article is definitely worth reading, as some of the details about that planet are amazing.

A picture from Astronomy Picture of the Day, the Andromeda galaxy in UV. Was thrilled to note that in the mouseover comparison, the correlation of UV areas with bright blue starforming areas.

From The Planetary Society, "Richard Kowalski is the first person in history to possess a piece of an object that he discovered in space", an asteroid detected in space and tracked to its impact in Sudan last year. I don't know how I managed not to hear of this at the time it happened, but here is an account from shortly after it happened.

Filter: curious

It should have read: "Astronomers Find Coldest, Driest, Calmest Place On Earth, Decide To Put Telescope There".

This site is an exciting prospect; am looking forward to what may be revealed, especially as we still cannot place telescopes in space as large as those we can build on Earth. Unless a project like the Terrestrial Planet Finder is approved. Still, despite being explicitly a very calm location I keep catching myself worrying how it will survive fierce Antarctic winds.

Almost forgot - a bit disappointing the site's latitude will keep any scopes there from seeing much of anything in the northern celestial sphere. There are plenty of worthy targets in the south, more than a lifetime's worth, but I do like comprehensive coverage.

Filter: optimistic

Note: Originally posted at feminist_rage

So we have a post at Bad Astronomy, where it is announced a new probe to Mars has been named Curiosity and that the name was bestowed by a sixth-grader named Clara Ma. Some of her essay was quoted:

Curiosity is an everlasting flame that burns in everyone’s mind. It makes me get out of bed in the morning and wonder what surprises life will throw at me that day. Curiosity is such a powerful force. Without it, we wouldn’t be who we are today. […] Curiosity is the passion that drives us through our everyday lives. We have become explorers and scientists with our need to ask questions and to wonder. Sure, there are many risks and dangers, but despite that, we still continue to wonder and dream and create and hope. We have discovered so much about the world, but still so little. We will never know everything there is to know, but with our burning curiosity, we have learned so much.

"At least it wasn't named Fluffy Miss Muffybunny..... (Note: NEVER give young girls unilateral naming power over anything other than rabbits or horses....)"

"So when is NASA going to stop letting little girls and fake talk show hosts name their spacecraft?

Now I am waiting for the Hanna Montana mission to Jupiter.

Or maybe the Jonas Brothers space probe to Venus."

Filter: angry

Whenever I hear that name I think 'Ellen degenerates' and imagine a woman who collapses matter to electron degeneracy, or perhaps neutronium.

Filter: silly

... how many people speak of 'cis' as a term adopted from chemistry, when my own first encounter with it was astronomical. Cislunar space, translunar space.

Filter: silly

Phil Plait has put together a fun list of Ten Things You Didn't Know About Pluto. I still had fun reading it even knowing the items on it already, so definitely recommending people take a look if they want a bit of astronomy for the day.

Going now to look at the other such lists he has done.

Filter: melancholy

Supernova:
Dr Shepard, a famed astrophysicist discovers - all too late - that the sun's age has been miscalculated and that it will supernova in a matter of only days destroying the Earth and everything else in our solar system. When Dr Shepard disappears, his prophecy materialises as enormous solar particles start to land on Earth. Amongst the panic, a group of scientists begin the desperate search for Dr Shepard, while the government scheme to help a small group of civilians escape the coming disaster by furnishing underground bunkers to shield and protect them.
Now, we could say everything in this movie works fine because if they are positing an error in one aspect of our astronomical knowledge for the premise of this film, why not more errors to cover up everything else? But that would not be fun.

They included a shot of Sydney being destroyed. I thought that was nice, the film-makers remembered Australia and decided to include it in the destruction. Then I looked up some material on the film and discovered it was supposedly set in Australia. I'd been confused by the lack of Australian accents, locations, set dressings, demographics, or indeed anything which looked other than American. I mean, excepting shots of places like the Taj Mahal or Korea. Apparently it was actually shot in South Africa using South African actors (and a lot of Americans), which I suppose gives an indication of the attention to detail and consistency here.

"We watched for a while before we realised that it wasn't Sydney, it was Capetown and the movie was actually set there. That explains why there were so many black people in 'Sydney', why the paper money was not Australian, why the number plates on all the vehicles were not Aussie and why one of the bad guys had such a weird accent.
Other clues - a quick glimpse of a building with a Dutch name and several long shots over the blasted city showing Table Mountain clearly as a background. "

...

"Negro house maids??? Negro?? Housemaids?? And not just one but two, one for each house"

We, uh, we don't execute people either. Better stop there before I run out of space.

Now, the disaster? Maybe it is not fair to criticise it since... No, we will get there the long way. Let's admit the premise of the disaster, and that alone, say maybe we have the age of the sun wrong. Unfortunately that is still not going to get us a supernova, because our sun has far too little mass for such an event to be part of its undisturbed existence.

If they wanted to be more realistic we might have to worry about an imminent expansion to red giant but perhaps most film-makers have difficulty sustaining tension over thousands of years of story time. They'd have to have that before we would be having a supernova anyway.

Then there were those... solar meteors. They looked a lot like meteorites from Armageddon destroying cities except these supposedly were ejected from the sun. Back before I realised this was supposed to be set in Australia I thought we had a bit of a 'flat world' effect when there appeared to be simultaneous strikes in India, Australia and the United States... but that might have been meant to be Australia too. After a while of that falling the scientist figures pronounced that they'd induce a nuclear winter and render humans extinct even before the supernova.

Bunkers seem a pretty pitiful way to attempt preservation of the species. Even if the planet weren't effectively destroyed by the explosion, humans remain ultimately dependant on sunlight to survive. It would be condemning them to a slow death rather than a swift one.

But we needn't have worried, because it turns out there was a mathematical operator substitution in the equation predicting the sun's revised lifespan and therefore no disaster impending after all. The solar meteors obligingly stopped at this point, and then the nuclear winter was rained out of the sky but not before a family had to fight off a serial killer (awful lot of handguns for Australia, btw).

In conclusion: o.O

I think the most saddening aspect was looking it up on IMDB and finding a couple of posts insisting on the movie's plausibility, one from someone claiming to have an interest in science. At least it is followed by Conan the Barbarian, which has the advantage of being set in a fictional time in a fictional place and not giving me any cause to think it might have been meant to be taken seriously.

Tags: astronomy, films, movies

Filter: amused

Programming: nomusic

Lately I have been watching videos we have around the place. Videos which were not much watched when they were new and especially videos which play documentary series and which were gifts from relatives.

I started with one which excited me when I saw the word Cosmos prominently on the front of the case. I was disappointed to discover the title is actually Mysteries of the Cosmos and it is not the famous series hosted by Carl Sagan, a series I have long wanted to see. I thought I'd mentioned that already on my journal but apparently not.

Tonight I am watching a series called Universe. In between, my sister and I watched Amadeus but it turns out that is not actually a documentary despite a) featuring people in costumes and b) playing a lot of classical music composed by someone not involved in the production. So, Universe. Am prompted to be posting now by thoughts inspired from the latter part of the first tape, concerning black holes.

They talked a lot about what happens to stuff which falls into a black hole, how it is inevitably drawn into the singularity and utterly destroyed. The thing is, that does not actually happen, at least from the perspective of an outside observer. The gravitational effect of a black hole is strongly attractive, yes, up close, but like all gravitational fields it also affects time. Watching from the outside we see time pass more slowly for an object as it approaches the event horizon until eventually it effectively stops, and we do not actually get to see it cross that point of no return. From the perspective of an object falling into a black hole it falls right in, but it also sees time speed up in the distance and all the stars go out first.

As far as I am aware this makes no practical difference; mass within a radius is still mass within a radius, but it does make me wish I were more mathematically proficient so I could explore.

Earlier parts of the video gave me an idea for a story too, so that's great. It has been done before and I find I do not actually care about that. Have the characters (been a while since they got a new tale), have the scene. If we get the details then we do the typing.

Time to put in the second tape.

Filter: energetic

(after this)


( We'll also cut this )

Filter: anxious

They both photograph stars and analyse the image, attempting to discern such information as life history, companions, or time and manner of demise and contribution to future generations.

Filter: amused

Google Reader Shared Items

1. Thank You Thursdays: Your (Notice I Didn't Say Female) Brain [via paradox_puree. Comments to the post made me warier of this video. Did she have that brain cut in half to illustrate her point? Am pretty sure most brains I have seen are in a single piece unless cut. Much of her described experience of having a stroke is not unfamiliar to me, if to a greater degree. Not, I stress, identical, but apparently similar to something which can be accessible to me. If I were to release certain brakes, if I could remember how. I have a lot of hostility to the frame in which she presents her thesis, despite finding much recognition or even agreement in the details.
   
   I dislike the way people jumped on ropty's comment ("Non-gendered? Dividing the world into two parts, one is linear, unemotional, calculating and the other about feeling, emotions, timeless oneness. Gee, that sounds rather gendered to me.") because this is a thing which is done, this is a way in which brain functioning is presented and those traits are very gendered in this society. Also that my readings of other writings on neurobiology suggest this is a highly oversimplified perspective on human brain hemisphere functioning, though as this was a talk for a lay audience that may have been deliberate. And it still seems to me her described experiences are very 'on point' even if I am not so fond of her presentation of them.
   
   I wonder if making such experience accessible at will would have the effect on the world Dr Taylor describes.]
2. Video: Blaser tournament unwisely fits Japanese robots with lasers -- PEW PEW [via soltice. If we intercut this with some footage of people we could make a movie of it.]
3. New Hubble Images Reveal Plethora of Interacting Galaxies [via soltice. Pretty!]
4. Young feminists just want to "go wild and pole dance" [via paradox_puree.]
5. How To Sing Like A Planet [via paradox_puree. Wherever there be medium and motion, music. The article makes me angry, with it's talk of 'merely' as if scientific explanation of such magnificent happenings cannot be also magnificent, wondrous or beautiful themselves. I lost a lot of esteem for the writer's prior musings when I read that part.]
6. Atheism is a condom for your mind [via soltice. The part I disagree with is the phrasing suggestive that removing religious belief is a part and precursor to mental hygiene and health -- I would place taking care of the mind first, and if that leads to the removal of religion then so be it. Someone eventually said so too.]
7. Equality Through Intimidation? The Houston HRC Dinner Protest [via paradox_puree.]
8. Comical Surroundings [via soltice. This is interesting but I think I would not like my furniture to be displaying always the same images and words. After so many repetitions reading, wearying.]
9. Modular, shape-shifting robots get right back up to creep you out [via soltice. Shiny! Still a ways to go before they are as capable as the version seen in Terminator 2 though.]
10. Australia to Remove Antigay Discrimination From 100 Laws [via soltice. An improvement, but not enough.]
11. Maintaining Moore's law with new memristor circuits [via soltice. Fascinating (a thing said when {in this case} interested but uneducated in a subject).]

1. Vaccination doesn't cause autism volume what-are-we-up-to-now? [And yet we see how well the continued lack of evidence substantiating a connection is received. *sigh*]

Filter: sleepy

I wonder very much about continuing these. If I did not, then I would say nothing of most of what I read, and give it less thought than if I attempted to find words for each. If I did not, I would read more, and quicker. I cannot quite shake the feeling that posting these is a pointless mechanical activity, a task continued because it was once set.

These links do not form an entirely honest record. There are items I have read and not noted because I did not wish to give the tacit approval of a link and did not know how to express or form criticism of the content in question.

The reason the majority of these are from shared items is, of course, that I have resolved to first become current with those before reading material of my own subscription.

About.com: Agnosticism / Atheism

1. Bias and Vested Interest: Interpreting Facts Unreasonably [Well, yes. I strive to avoid this but on good days do not pretend I achieve it.]

1. Even More Political Chutzpah [I suspect most people do not investigate such claims - I know I tend not to, and rely on information provided by those who do.]

1. Mysterious White Rock Fingers on Mars [via paradox_puree. Mars may not be my favourite planet (which is? none, really, the overexposure of Mars or any other location seen as a prospect for life grates on me) but areology is fascinating!]
2. Because I can't help but make a LIAR out of myself [via soltice. I agree with this post. That photo is far too pretty for me to quite believe. Really, flower-filled meadows? Wild grass is brown, not green, and never contains flowers. This sort of scene is about as fantastical to me as the elves and snow I read of in stories.]
3. Inflation Theory Takes a Little Kick in the Pants [via soltice. The people commenting (at least at first) do not seem have understood what they read - the main claim is that a previously thought clear test for inflation has been found to produced by other sources too, and thus detection of this gravitational radiation cannot easily be taken as confirmation of the theory.]
4. Industry execs sound IPv6 alarm - is the sky really falling? [via soltice. Mm. I tend to be wary of people saying we have plenty of time to deal with a foreseen problem. Often, it seems solving it takes longer than projected.]
5. HP Mini-Note gets unboxed, causes extreme jealousy [via soltice. Presumably this computer is a big deal.]
6. Let's all pack up and move to Great Britain [via soltice. Odd seeing posts from feeds I have subscribed to shared by other people, and not reading them more directly. this comment sort of seems on the nose to me:
   
   "Us Brits aren't precisely an areligious lot - most of us have some sort of faith, but it's so vague and noncommittal that it passes for atheism.
   
   You know the kind of thing - "I believe there's something comforting out there but I don't know what it is and whatever it is I'm not going to let it affect my life. It's just nice to believe sometimes."
   
   So, when Brits say they're afraid of "religion", what they're really afraid of is passionate religion. And seeing as Anglicanism is by definition almost never passionate, they're afraid of other religions being passionate. And in practice that means...Islam.
   
   When my countryfolk talk about the evils of religion, they're talking about mosques, the Quran and ramadan. But what they're thinking about is bombs.
   
   So you see we're not so elightened after all."]
   
   Pam's House Blend
   
   1. NYT article on convention bloggers features Pam's House Blend
   
   
   theinferior4+1
   
   1. Border Crossings

Filter: blank

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

I have not been updating much recently. This seems odd to me, as I used to post as often as half a dozen times a day.

It might be tempting to blame this on Pokemon, which I have recently started playing again and the playing of which has been interfering with my ability to hold conversations with people. But that would only apply to the past couple of days at most and I am talking about something of months.

(I started with Yellow, by the way, and so far have a little team in Vista counting of course a pikachu [Chikapu], rattata [Ratsy], pidgey [Perchy] and two nidorans, male and female [Nirodan and Nita, respectively].)

For the past several weeks I have been undertaking an industry placement for TAFE two days a week, which means working in a somewhat looking Catholic high school library. It has been interesting and fun. I got to do actual cataloging for a catalogue. Well, copy-cataloguing. Also designed and put up a display on this year's Olympics, shelving, cleaning shelves, some circulation (mostly the checking out of laptops to students, who seldom borrow books when I am looking) and end-processing. Also recently making sure signage is in the right place and designing new signs for the shelves.

This necessitated much colour-matching yesterday, to get the new signs with their number breakdown to match the colours of the existing signs pointing to the first hundred divisions. The other people there seemed to think this was a sort of brilliant idea so yay. Currently that is in an intermediate state of being cut to size before getting laminated, after I spent much of yesterday calculating the right font size to use to get the desired spacing, and other such sign-related activities.

The point of saying all this is that I have been doing work-type things for nearly the first time in my life and although for a while it was leaving me tired unto sleep once I got home (now less so to the point of being able to be productive ish in my own time again) and it has been interesting and varied and even in some cases fun. So far I have managed not to succumb to the occasional bouts of anxiety which have me wanting to whimper in a corner until it goes away and I have managed to do socialising a bit.

So. Library work. I can do this. I have also been finding that, if this is what library work is, it is not interesting enough for me to want to do indefinitely. Fortunately it is something I can do and not hate and even enjoy in parts, so I am not looking to abandon it even for the next several years barring some unexpected opportunity, and may well continue with it for a very long time. However, I will definitely be considering what else I might do that could provide me with more intellectual satisfaction.

Astronomy is something I have been wanting more and more to get back to. Doing so would mean really working on my mathematical skills, which I keep not doing. Still not sure how to do so, though I am sure it involves cutting down on the amount I feel obligated to do online and especially the things I do to shut off my brain and thought. Even if I do, I am doubtful I would want to pursue a career in research. It seems laden with a lot of distasteful scrabbling for funds and tenure and a whole lot of pressures not really related to learning about the universe.

Writing is something else. Despite my occasional mutterings about the end of my writing, I do not intend to give it up. I am less focused these days on the idea of publication, and even if I am published it is unlikely I would be so successful and prolific that I would be able to write full-time. It might however provide a diversion from work which would satisfy me. I might find, too, this 'satisfaction' thing in other aspects of my life which I do not expect.

Satisfy, that is a curious sort of word to use. I do not imagine myself ever being satisfied in life, experiencing contentment without ambition. But I might apply that word to the pursuit of things, to engagement with what I am doing, to the journey itself even if no destination can quite compare.

While writing this I have been thinking about my recent decline in posting. There have been ideas.

One is that I am currently in three romantic relationships and quite possibly this has the effect of socially saturating me. There are people (not limited to those I am in relationships with, though nearly so) who are willing to talk to me on a near-daily basis in interesting ways. I do not have much desire to seek out social contact outside what I already have - the main reason at present is the inconvenience of the hours, which leave me often awake with no one about.

Another is that posting is a habit and a mindset, and one I have fallen out of. More than once over the past few weeks I have begun writing a post only to lose heart soon after. I was a bit depressed in the first half of the year and this may have had an effect.

The last one in this little list is that I have been doing such things as going to classes and this industry placement, and I find such activities exhausting beyond their content. Often the first day after these (Tuonday and Sriday currently) I spend decompressing, not doing much at all beyond recovery. So this is going to cut into what I actually do in my free time, although it seems to be improving.

And that seems to be all for now.

Filter: bored

Again, not so much read. Didn't I used to read more? Most of it after the point I decided I was too tired to do anything productive but not yet willing to sleep. Eventually I worked out why: it is because I am doing other things with my time, often social things. If I spend a few hours on Skype with soltice and pazi_ashfeather, of course I am not going to doing quite so much reading in the day.

Cosmic Variance

1. Dark Matter and Fifth Forces [Unfortunately I know this stuff less well than I ever did, but still a moment of "Oh wow, that is really interesting" in reading.]

1. Biodiesel Mythbuster 2.0: Twenty-Two Biodiesel Myths  Dispelled [via soltice. Long, interesting. Not something I am really qualified to evaluate. Looks decent though.]
2. Electric Skateboard (Double Comic) [via paradox_puree. skipped because I am not reading xkcd yet.]
3. Gibson intros SG Robot Guitar, new edition of Les Paul version [via soltice. My first thought was that this must be a guitar designed by William Gibson. I still do not know.]
4. What is the big deal about stuff white people like? [via paradox_puree. When I started reading this I thought I would have some quick, possibly snarky thing to say in response, but it turned out to be a serious criticism of the blog, one that made a lot of sense to me. Oh, one thing to add. I am inclined to agree with the comments to this post that 'Stuff White People Like' is fairly conservative in outlook in cliche in line, but the way it is framed still does some good by jarring white people to take another look at their assumptions and culture. At least, it did for me the first time I encountered it.]
5. Video: Little Big Man - today is a good day to die [via soltice. A robot driving a robot. Sort of. But it tempts me to have thoughts about things so it must be art.]
6. Australian government wants power to snoop work e-mail, IMs [via soltice. Oh, those insidious terrorists.]
7. Toon: A Few Reasons Why (We Need a Transgender Rights Bill) [via paradox_puree. Interesting. Not ever seen this site before. The rest of her work on the site seems pretty neat too.]
8. Libraries in crisis? [via soltice. Refers to here. Not so great news for someone hoping to work there next year. I am not convinced the writer of the article knows what ey is talking about though.]
9. Toon: The Joys of Tax Time! [via paradox_puree. If this keeps up, I may subscribe myself. Or this is good too.]
10. Burning Car [via paradox_puree. First thought: bored. On further examination, fascinated by the moments which might be so captured and their preservation marking dramatically the stilled moments of time marking the shifting sources of these images.]
11. Yuri's Planet [via paradox_puree. Thought I had starred this for possible desktop use. Apparently not. Fixed now.]

1. solticepazi_ashfeatherLeishmaniasis Parasites Evade Death By Exploiting Immune Response To Sand Fly Bites [Sometimes I wonder what immune systems do when they are not being subverted. Sometimes.]

Filter: sad

Forget the preamble ramble. I want to be reading again. So I am. These are the things I am reading today accompanied by brief reactions. Look how far behind we are!

a denizen's entertainment

1. Geeky, philosophical and scientific things... [Still love the zombie movie. Not interested in reading the environment link again, but recall both agreeing and disagreeing with parts. Now, the paper on the hypothetical weakless universe? That was so fascinating I did not read it last time, wanting to save it for when I could better appreciate it. It looks to me like the purpose of this simulation was to probe the anthropic principle. Which is a tricky thing to phrase and apparently rather contentious, but the experiment appears to demonstrate that whatever factors constrain the laws of this universe to be what they are, at least in the case of the weak nuclear force it is not that were things different there would be no observers to observe this. It seems I misunderstood from the abstract, but what they did is no less fascinating. Please, do take a read of it yourself - it is fascinating and reinforces just how much I want to get back into astronomy.]

1. Accordian-style USB drive actually solves a problem [via soltice. Not really clear on how it solves the problem of loseable caps.]
2. I have no words :O [via paradox_puree. Way back last time I was reading and using Reader, shared some posts I intended later to write on. Seems then paradox_puree found lost_angelwings's blog interesting enough to inspect from this. And the links here linked, bizarre comic indeed. Manga girl Jesus.]
3. What is Darwin? [via soltice. Interesting. Content took me a bit to find though.]
   

1. Introduction [This looks very much in reference to the poem's contents. I will read it after the poem, when I have hopefully some context for this.]

Filter: rushed

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

Light is of course a fluid. Drennets learn this at a very early age and frequently run outside as children to catch in cups the daily rain of sunlight, which they keep glowing by their bedside at night, or drink to feel its warmth flow through and fill their bodies right to the very tips of their fingers and hair, sometimes overindulging to the point of themselves beginning to glow and leak, or sometimes dip brush or finger in and use as paint, that special paint which is seen at night until it dries and fades or leaves radiant stains in many a youngster's reach.

As they grow older, the more inquisitive might experiment with pouring sunlight through prisms and learning the tastes of the colours. Hot, sharp violet, the tang of green, sweet soothing red. Mixing and remixing, sometimes sifting fine and collecting as many gradations as they can for experiments artistic, culinary, scientific, or some combination of the three. Or perhaps the simple joy of collecting.

Sunlight is plentiful and easy to collect, its fall regular, predictable, and abundant. Starlight is different. Each faint glittering point in the night produces such fine mist it might take a night, a week, a month to fill even a thimble. Each star's light is different. Tinted, flavoured, altered by its source and path. Dust-sweetened, tang of re-radiation, merest whisper of brushing other worlds.

Each unique, each precious. In fields beyond the cities myriad dishes open at night, each arranged just so to collect its target's light, stored for later collection in specially mirrored containers to prevent evaporation. These are used much the way sunlight often is: art, flavour, science. Starlight distilled, starlight blended, starlight flowing glowing in many-threaded tubes, the light of a thousand suns mingling in intricate sculpture in a dark room. Expensive seasoning, fierce nova light, never to be tasted again in a lifetime.

Night falls and silver flowers open to the light.

Filter: creative

Although the galaxies depicted in Stargate: SG1 and Stargate: Atlantis exhibit a remarkable frequency of terrestrial, habitable planets, it is also notable that such worlds in each galaxy exhibit generally a distinct, consistent terrain.

Specifically, nearly every world on each show is a forest, and the same forest within the show, but a different one between shows. Clearly significant - this researcher thinks the Atlantis forest looks greener and has higher resolution leaves than the SG1 forest, and possibly indicative of seeding by a hitherto unknown precursor species separate to the Ancients, or possibly merely a shift in Ancient aesthetic.

Filter: silly

From Zuska|Thus Spake Zuska via Julianne|Cosmic Variance:

This paper describes a statistical analysis showing clear discrimination by gender among postdoctoral researchers participating in a particle physics experiment. So far as I am aware it has not been published, nor is scheduled to be published. Nor am I capable of evaluating the rigour of the analysis, having only one mostly-forgotten class on statistics in my past (if anyone reading this can do so, that would be appreciated). Such constitutes my disclaimer.

For people interested in getting straight to the results, here is the most straightforwardly worded portion of this paper:

We find that females were allotted 40% more service work than males, and that the chances of this occurring in the absence of gender bias are less than 1%. This observation that females are significantly more often shunted into service work roles echoes the results of a study performed 27 years ago by Mary Gaillard (1980) on the status of of female physicists at CERN, a very large European particle physics laboratory. Particle physics has not progressed very far in this respect in the last three decades.

We also find that females were significantly more productive than their male peers in both
physics and service work, yet were awarded significantly fewer conference presentations; all 9 females in our sample were more productive than 24 out of the 48 males, yet the females had to be on average 3 times more productive than their male peers in order to be awarded a conference presentation. The chances of this occurring in the absence of gender bias are
less than 1%. This result is in remarkable concordance with the research of Wenneras and Wold, who found that females in their study had to be on average 2.5 times more productive than their male peers in order to receive a postdoctoral fellowship.

We note that this dearth of allocated conference presentations appears to hinder the ability of otherwise highly qualified females to become faculty members.

Filter: disappointed

My oh my, what a thing to find on one's desktop!


A pair of galaxies spied amid the twirl of passionate embrace, drawing ever closer in their romantic dance. Heedless, they cast off streamers of dust and gas, molten stellar droplets flung free and with every pass passing closer they press together, diving into the substance of the other, igniting in their mutual compression fires which blaze across the cosmos for all to see and do not care for they are beautiful.

Filter: ecstatic

If it did not taste so good with every drop, surely we would stop drinking it.

Since it was not visible from here, I am going to watch the lunar eclipse via Celestia. Celestia is being finicky in GNOME and KDE. Going to try installing the GNOME frontend, see if that helps. Also xorsa because it looks fun.

Filter: curious

I added to the front page of this journal a link to the feed articles I have marked for sharing in Google Reader.

soltice showed me this gorgeous (and large) illustration of the universe in logarithmic scale, though I thought Venus approached nearer than Mars. So far have not been able to find a reference for mean separation, perhaps will have to open an actual book.

mantic_angel showed me a delight of public art. I'd never seen something by Improv Everywhere before, even though such things have been indirectly inspirational to me already, but it is marvellous and caused me to smile. I sent the former link to my sister a few minutes ago and it was not working at the time, perhaps it will be up again later.

Incidentally, I tend to read the website as "improve everywhere".

Otherwise today had lovely pattering light rain and darkness which I've not felt in so many years... It contained some very wonderful things including but not limited to conversation.

Still annoyed at my seeming lack of time for thought and learning. This is an artefact of poor prioritisation and time management, being worked on.

Recently received a mass invite to Facebook from a high school friend I've not contacted for years. Already had an account, decided to add them.

When classes start up in next week the intention is to present mostly female. Advice is solicited, especially on questions or other reactions which may need dealing with. I do not actually expect people to notice but if someone did and started asking things, I'd be stumped.

Filter: loved

So reportedly NASA is soliciting input on creating a massively multiplayer online game.

Anyone read Ender's Game? (actually I haven't, but have read Ender's Shadow)

Filter: amused

    From this post I learn there is a small chance of a recently discovered asteroid colliding with Mars. Naturally I went to my own favoured sources to get more information.
    Anyway, there is news here. Numbers are all there. The object is about the same size as the one that exploded over Tunguska in 1908 but since Mars has a thinner atmosphere than Earth, if it hits it is expected to make a crater roughly 1 km in diameter.
    There have not been many observed impacts, however, so if this object (2007 WDS) does hit
 it will be a good opportunity to test the models that have been developed in the past. Previous impact possibilities (aimed at Earth usually because that is where we are and where we look to guard) have on further observation negligible chance of impact (with one possible exception). It is likely that further observations and refined orbital predictions will also lead to the conclusion 2007 WDS is going to miss Mars but from what I have been reading most scientists are hoping it will hit.
    It seems odd to me at first thought, to be hoping for catastrophic change to a planet's surface, but then I am quite preservationist in instinct. There is no conscious agency behind the asteroid's movement, which would be one of a few more momentous discoveries than an impact and a large part of my initial concern over such an event comes from my perspective in time, I think.
    Humans are ephemeral creatures, our culture barely less so. There have likely been several such impacts on Mars - indeed, on Earth too - since the beginning of recorded history, but not since we have been able to detect them in advance. Over longer timescales this is insignificant, a commonplace and minor occurrence, but possibly a fascinating opportunity for us to learn from.
    This post suggests that the impact flash would not be visible from Earth, but fortunately we have a number of probes available to collect data on-site. The projected impact site is even near to the area being explored by the Opportunity rover, although not so near that the rover itself is in danger. I wonder if it would be able to return any images of the event.

    Perhaps seeing the creation of a crater roughly this size by an object only 50 m across would remind governments of the importance of funding projects to survey the sky for objection which might impact Earth, such as the one which discovered 2007 WDS.
    I should note that 2007 WDS was discovered after its closest approach to Earth, as is often the case.

Filter: excited

    Click here for it.

Filter: loved

    Another thing (parasite) which has been going round. This time people who volunteer in the comments will explain seven of their interests which I will choose. And now, my time has come round. Right now I am feeling slightly dead and never have I been good at this sort of thing but an attempt has been promised and so an attempt shall be made.

( It is larger on the inside )

Filter: melancholy

    After my lab this afternoon I was unwinding by catching up on this paper. The short of it is, the authors have looked at the distribution of angular momentum in planetary systems with only one known planet and found a correlation with mass - those planets with mass greater than twice Jupiter's also have high specific angular momentum and vice versa.
    They also found a correlation with the semi-major axis of the planet's orbit, which would be expected since planets with smaller orbits also tend to have lower mass. The hypothesis offered is that lower mass planets lose angular momentum more easily than higher mass planets and thus are more likely to migrate inwards.
    Well, that is mostly summary. The graphs at the end of the paper illustrate the trend quite strongly. Of course, this paper does not look at multiple planet systems, but they promise to examine those in a future paper. I look forward to seeing if this finding persists.

    And right now I have no idea what mechanism might be responsible, nor is one proposed. I wonder if it extends all the way down the mass scale and how many terrestrial worlds could have been swallowed by their sun?

    A few other interesting looking papers were referenced in this one Hopefully I will have time to check them out too.

Filter: curious

    Planetquest reports on the discovery of the largest known extrasolar planet. TrES-4's mass was found to be only 0.84+/- 0.10 that of Jupiter but its radius is 1.674+/-0.094 Jupiter's. That is, well, large. It works out to ~119,680km (radius, not diameter) if I am lazy and use Wikipedia and Jupiter's equatorial radius.

    Aaaanyway, for a long while Jupiter was thought to be about as large as a non-stellar object could get because as mass is piled onto it (pretend you are an advanced alien civilisation that puts stuff on other stuff for fun), the increase in its gravitational field balances its tendency to expand, so that even brown dwarfs many times Jupiter's mass are nearly the same size. It is only when the object is sufficiently massive for fusion to occur that hydrostatic equilibrium shifts again and the object 9star, now, or young massive brown dwarf) expands to much larger size.

    Well, this is what was thought when the prevailing opinion was that all gas giants exist comfortably far from any stars, much as Jupiter does. Then we discovered the solar system is not as ordinary as we thought and a great many giant planets orbit their stars with suicidal closeness. External heat sources can do the job of internal ones in a pinch, so many of these 'hot jupiters' (yes, that is what they are being called these days, those wacky astronomers - I can imagine people in the distant future talking about jupiter this and jupiter that and not knowing where that particular technical term came from) are larger in size than our Jupiter, even though they tend to be lower in mass.

    Of course in the years since models have been developed to explain the expansion of superheated giant planets, but one of the things that make TrES-4 so interesting is that it is actually larger even than those models predict, so I am very much looking forward to finding out why.

    ...

    People like facts and figures, right? TrES-4 has a density of ~0.2g/cubic cm, roughly the same as balsa wood. It and its host star - which is more massive than Sol and thus entering its giant phase despite being about the same age* - are around 1400  light years distant and its temperature is about 1600 K. Its orbit is only about 4,500,000 km from the surface of its sun and its period is roughly three and a half days.

    Happy now? ^_^

    Love,
          Tricia Fakename

*This world, the same age as our own, is at the end of its natural lifespan. Superheated and boiling away, it will soon be swallowed up and blasted out existence by the death throes of the star which gave birth to it.

Filter: excited

    More information on the LED lighting project courtesy Corpus Callosum. Apparently they are indeed taking advantage of the lights' increased directionality to reduce light pollution. Yay for astronomy!

    Lots of instrumentation information here as probes study Mars during one of its famous dust storms. The rovers, however, are in an endurance race. Will battery power be sufficient for them to continue operating until the sky clears?

    I did not know the HiRISE team has a blog until I read that article. Now I am wondering how many other missions and instruments have blogs I could be reading to keep updated.

Filter: worried

    Emily Lakdawalla reports on the recent discovery of four (as yet unnamed) moons orbiting Saturn. So far that makes 60, none of which can make a decent cocktail.
    These new moons, like many of Saturn's, are about half the size of Deimos, which is pretty small. The curious should click through if they wish to see an animation of the discovery images for one of the newly found satellites.

Filter: excited

    Now it seems they are planning to increase NASA's budget but cut planetary exploration, particularly the Martian program even though the rovers seem to be doing fine.

Religious belief in Australia is falling, sadly more from apathy than anything else, I think. Our local media seemed not so excited about it but PZ Myers is positively emerald. ^_^

Steinn Sigurðsson|Dynamics of Cats has been to a conference and oh how I envy him. I mean, he has to endure terrible hardships, but just look at the conference highlights he has posted so far here (+!), here (amongst other things, Barnard's Star appears not to have any candidates so far so no Barnardian eels, alas, while Proxima Centauri may with further inspection) and here.

I won't say much because, really, all I have to go on are the quick bullet points he has posted so far, but I have not been so hungry since the last time I was in a really good bookshop. A lot of this is amazing and fascinating and the more information we get on the population of planets out there the more wonders we know.

If I were to go into academia this is what I would study, but alas I lack the skills and the dedication, so I will just sit here on the sidelines. :-P

And now it is off to sleep for me. Keep well, people.

Love,
    Tricia Fakename

Filter: ecstatic

    Steinn Sigurðsson|Dynamics of Cats reports on a planetary candidate in orbit around a white dwarf ~50pc distant. This system could actually be broadly similar to what lies in the solar system's future, as I am sure news reports will point out ad nauseam.

Filter: excited

One of the articles I read today has reminded me of something I sometimes wonder, about how our screens and cameras look in wavelengths we don't see. I know (assume) we don't make any effort to capture those faithfully but I don't know we specifically exclude them. So I wonder how our screens look in those wavelengths and if photo manipulation software affects the appearance of our photos in infrared and ultraviolet in a way incongruous with the effects we produce in visible light. It makes me think that if we ever expand the range of our vision we will need to revamp our equipment and software to remove distortions and artefacts we are presently unaware of - once we realise something is wrong.
( Read more... )

( Cut to preserve human eyes )

Filter: tired

    A thought, earlier in the reading than the writing. I have noticed a very strong tendency for readers to only comment on a single aspect of a blog post. Often, indeed, people will remark on the same thing rather than each picking a different topic to follow. I could not say if this is an artefact of following after the first to comment or of a particular part of the post finding better resonance with the readers in general, or to what degree it might be a combination of those (or other?) factors.
    It does tend to make me inclined to separate thoughts into posts rather than paragraphs to better spark discussion (although I also am wary of what I have seen called 'spamming people's friends lists'). Is that bad or good? It is a change in style from my previous unexamined preference. An adaptation to the medium which maybe better accomplishes goals (provoking discussion, sharing ideas, providing learning/enlightenment opportunities for myself), so it may well be good. If I could someday say the state of the world has been improved I might even call it Good but that is rather unrealistic.
    It is a change and on that ground I am inclined to dislike it. Is this because I grew up reading of older modes of discussion and hoped someday to participate in them myself? I think so. I am disappointed but, to refuse to take into account the fact that the world* is changing (I cannot appreciate how much) would be counter-productive. Nor would I know how. Do I write a letter to my friends?
    That blog posts slip away so swiftly is an annoyance. Oh, they are saved and still accessible later but they only hold attention very, very transiently. This might be more a matter of substance than medium. Sometimes when I have written something I am especially pleased with I am tempted to withhold from further posting for a number of days so that it remains more visible, even though anyone who reads what I have to say is using LiveJournal and the flow of their river is little affected by what I do. Should put in a feature request to be able to tag posts into streams of varying priority, then the daily grind can flow on and disappear while topics for discussion remain visible until displaced by more discussion.
    These thoughts are incomplete.

Amusement: Blogging software in a browser with built-in spell-check ability does not recognise 'blog' as a legitimate word.
Further amusement: I suspect I ironically mangled that laughing sentence.

Ami Angelwings Heavenly Comic Rants

1. Negativity hurts Ami :( [Ami is right. Nominal equality doesn't mean everything is peachy keen now, there is still time needed for (hopefully) social attitudes overall to improve. And spreading negativity, pulling other people down does not seem very helpful to me - I rather thought the idea was to pull people up, so to speak, although if a person is behaving badly/advocating for a harmful position I do thing they should be called on it somehow. Sadly, my opinion is that a large part of this is human nature and not subject to change in the immediate future.]
   

1. Small update :O [*sigh* At least I know where not to spend money]

1. Pantheon Earth and Moon [It took me a while to see this as an image of something real.]
2. 3D Face on Mars [I need to make a pair of those red/blue glasses]
3. Smooth Sections of Asteroid Itokawa [The rubble-pile asteroid collision simulation shown in this link bears passing resemblance to simulations of colliding galaxies. That site looks very interesting. Must revisit. I think this particular APOD is a repeat though, hasn't taken account of the CIA World Factbook move. I am excited to learn what we might discover when Hyabusa returns - we have never brought a sample of an asteroid back to Earth for study before (although there have been some self-deliveries). Note to self: Find out more about these low gravity 'space hopper' probes. Amusement: The Wikipedia article on the 'Brazil Nut Effect' has been edited to mention this picture, since that kind of sorting by size has been proposed as a mechanism to explain the lack of visible craters on the asteroid. I suppose what we need to do now is send another probe to probe its interior with radar.]
4. A Supply Ship Approaches the Space Station [Just as it says. The blog of one of the astronauts being delivered is here, too bad I did not know about it while it was being written. Photo added to desktop slideshow.]
5. The Sun in Three Dimensions [Hey! You're missing one!]
6. Carina Nebula Panorama from Hubble [Eta Carinae is one of my favourite possibly already dead stars. As the article said it did fade dramatically in the 1830s (and if memory serves, had first brightened dramatically). Eta Carinae is one of the most luminous, massive stars we know of. Possibly it is even larger than our theories allow for a star to be - but it is not the most stable of stars, already having blown off an amount of mass equivalent to that of our Sun many times over and producing frequent, enormous eruptions. It is not expected to last long for a star. And it might be a binary! I remember reading a paper in the university library suggesting that a regular variation in X-ray output may be caused by a companion star with a ~5 year orbit, although the amount of dust and gas Eta is giving off, I think, make it impossible for us to observe directly. Eta Carinae's companion might be much smaller than Eta but still be a rare giant among stars - Eta Carinae is in a class of perhaps a dozen out of ~200 million stars in this galaxy. So naturally this is another desktop picture]
7. Gliese 581 and the Habitable Zone [Yup, they are finally finding these worlds. There will be many, many more to come.]
8. M81 in Ursa Major [Pretty!]
9. Young Moon and Sister Stars [I wanted to see this but kept forgetting to look]
   

1. And still no blog carnival because... []
   

1. Further Ruminations on Girls, Coming of Age, and the Hero's Journey [The often important reminder that, in valuing difference, one must be careful not to devalue the ordinary ('sneering at "the mundanes"'). Read the comments. I want to keep thinking about the topics raised here and they do plenty to keep it going.]
2. "They didn't want the violence to be real or the truths to be inconvenient." [Refers to this post by Gwyneth Jones|Bold As Love. New word for me: traduce. I am tempted to step away and say I do not have the education or insight to respond to this. Yet, if I do, how will I ever acquire them? I believe I must attempt to engage in order to learn. So I will ponder the first question coming to mind: what else could be considered a success? Is there any other outcome that might be considered a victory for more than immediate visceral gratification? But those questions fail to address the substance of the post. More understanding required. The word grok springs ironically to mind (I get to use that word once more in this post before you are allowed to complain.]
   

1. 2007-04-28 [*smiles* Not that easy]
   

1. 2007-04-28 [:-/ Sure, she's sitting on the mallet, but what is holding the mallet up?]
   

1. 2007-04-28 [meh]
   

1. 445: A Song for the Departed [I had been trying to wait and see how sad I should be, before Rich Burlew went and had Elan show us.]

1. 2007-04-28 [also meh]

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Nifty post by A.J.S. Rayl at the Planetary Society giving an overview of the ESA's Mars Express. Haven't heard as much about them as NASA's two rovers even though they arrived about the same time but it has been making a lot of interesting discoveries.

I personally am not as enthusiastic about searching specifically about life or water (which apparently defaults to life anyway), although I would be (and have been) appropriately excited when those things are found. I would like it if other discoveries and aspects of exploration could be met with as much interest, but apparently that does not tickle our self-absorption the same way. It frustrates me enormously that apparently the easiest way to get funding is to code a project as somehow searching for life in the wider universe.

Okay, tangential rant over. Go read already. There's pretty pictures! Also the truth about the Face of Mars, revealed! [Tabloid talk! *scrubs self*]

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Filter: impressed

To celebrate, here is a sunshot. The time was now when I made the screenshot. This does seem to be a slightly older and buggier version on Celestia to what I am used to, so I hope someone is still maintaining the package. When version 1.5 is released I suppose I will know for sure. Anyway, enjoy!

Filter: disappointed

I was watching an old tape of Transformers last night. It doesn't seem too likely to me that a kids show made these days would blithely show a good character gambling (and cheating at it) and then going for force when they still don't get what they want, let alone having the main role model character endorse the activity at the end of the episode.

News from Enceladus (AKA that moon the name of which I always forget how to spell): Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society writes about two papers, one suggesting that chemicals detected in Enceladus' geysers indicate warmth and chemical activity (warm here apparently means 300 to 575 degress Celsius, wow!). The other paper deduces from the lower elevation of the moon's south polar region that there could be a reservoir of melted water beneath the surface (this is where the geysers are active, I believe)

And now for something I forgot to include in my post last night:

Story Linkdex
fiction tag
A Day in the Life
Meditation
Rain
Maricia
'Vhrydal' Sketch
'Krellain + Than' Sketch
Sliced
untitled story
First
Jayde

1. 'This Land' 1
2. 'This Land' 2
3. 'This Land' 3
4. 'This Land' 4

1. Black Riders

Filter: happy

Hee!

More importantly, watch this wondrous video of Saturn's moons in motion. I owe lantyssa something wonderful for finding it.

Post Scriptum: Since I am posting sciency linky-links, here is my current desktop.

Filter: excited

1. pecunium explains what disturbs him about the poll he wrote about earlier (and I linked to below). Includes link to Orcinus'  appendix documenting eliminationist rhetoric from the U.S.A's right wing. Be sure to read the comments of pecunium's post for further elaboration on his part
2. Possible discovery of a lake on Titan the size of the Sea of Caspian. My text is calm but inside I am freaking out excitedly
3. Skatje's experience with the United States schooling system. I did not realise it was so bad.

    According to John Scalzi|Whatever, New Mexico is considering legislation [resolution text*] to declare Pluto a planet. This is probably because Clyde Tombaugh apparently came from the county the Representative responsible represents (isn't it nice when they do that?).
    The official stance of the International Astronomical Union is, as I am sure everyone knows by now, that Pluto is not considered a planet because it has not "cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit". Instead, it is what they call a dwarf planet.
    My official stance, which I try to repeat every chance I get in hopes of the idea picking up momentum, is that the IAU made the wrong decision. Pluto should be considered a planet, but because it is not the most dynamically significant body in its orbit (it is locked in a 3:2 resonance with Neptune and even without Neptune there are many other KBOs of comparable size 'nearby') it should be considered a minor or dwarf planet, as you will. The main difference is that it, Eris and Ceres would still be planets, just a particular kind. Under the IAU resolution that is a seperate class of thing, not a sub-classification.
    Also I really like the idea of making Pluto|Charon a double planet. Wouldn't that be neat?


*According to this resolution, merely discovering another moon of Pluto would de-planet it again.

Filter: amused

[From God is for Suckers! via the Bronze Blog]

Edit: For Emphasis

Filter: enthralled

Yes, another. Al Murray interviews Buzz Aldrin. From Bad Astronomy.

Filter: hopeful

Phil Plait introduces ‘Q & BA', in which he takes questions from readers and produces a video answering some (this week, galaxies). Go check it out! To send in questions of your own, see here.

• A comet is a mass of dust and ice endlessly falling. When it falls too low it is boiled away by sunlight; the million-kilometre trail of debris and sparking destruction from this is what we see as beautiful in our skies
• Humans, like almost all life on this planet, are water held together by dirt and powered by sunlight
• Sunlight is pretty potent stuff
• I suffer from the delusion of being able to process an infinite amount of information
• Sometimes I try to do without sleep. This never works. Nonetheless, it continues to seem both easy and appealing
• I am supposed to post the next instalment of Jayde tomorrow, which I missed last week and for which I apologise
• Tomorrow looks to be too busy and interrupted for proper editing to be done
• Perhaps it can be posted the day after instead. This is still Wednesday in some places and therefore Not Cheating
• Jayde has a feeling of petering out in my mind. Possibly it is a story of disconnection/connection, certainly both seem needed for its writing
• There are many other stories I am excited about telling. This translates into a sort of enthusiasm for writing them which never seems to result in a actual writing
• ???
• Time before getting up again: 100 minutes
• Yikes!

Filter: sleepy

    Or perhaps I should be more specific and say C/2006 P1, since Robert McNaught has apparently discovered a number of comets on the order of two dozen.


    I was searching to see if a more firm determination of the comet's orbit had been made so I could check when we might expect it to return and how far out its aphelion lay (I was under the impression this was Comet McNaught's first visit to the inner solar system; it must have been disturbed from its orbit decades ago [conservative amateur estimate] and been falling inward ever since). Well, possibly you can imagine my surprise, dear reader, when I checked the comet's Wikipedia entry and found its eccentricity listed as 1.00003006 (that its inclination of nearly 78 degrees places its orbit at something like right angles to what we traditionally think of as the 'solar system' is not unusual). Possibly you can not.

    In either case I am inclined to say that in astronomy eccentricity (e) is often described as a measure of how noncircular an orbit is. For a circular orbit e = 0. If the orbit is elliptical, as is the usual case, e is between 0 and 1. When e = 1 then the orbit is parabolic and if e > 1, as in this case, the orbit is said to be hyperbolic. I have also seen this described as 'open' - if the value quoted at Wikipedia is accurate then McNaught is never coming back and this was a one-shot show. Naturally, there are no values listed for period or aphelion distance.

    My first thought was that this must be an example of an interstellar comet, just passing through and otherwise unrelated to our old friend Sol, but as this article sensibly points out it may simply be the case that our comet picked up a bit of a boost from some interaction during its passage. I suspect if there were indications McNaught were of interstellar origin a bigger (or different) fuss would have been raised - but I am somewhat out of the noose so perhaps there was.and I did not realise.

Filter: curious