Ribert & Roberts Wonderland

You can watch Ribert and Robert’s Wonderland episode about Space via this link to Google Video.

Saturn Up Close and Personal

Image Credit: Cassini Imaging Team and NASA/JPL/CICLOPS

The dorks over at CICLOPS (Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations) have released a bunch of cool pictures of Saturn. There’s been a lot of talk about Pluto lately but let’s face it: Saturn is the coolest planet.

Micky D’s 2nd Law of Gravity

Someone on the LiveJournal Astronomy Community noticed that the McDonald’s Happy Meal has a space theme to it this week. There just happens to be a McDonalds within eye sight of where I wait to pick up my wife from work. So instead of spending those 15 minutes in a state of inclined-car-seat repose, I made with the drive through, abused the scanner and bring you science visualization of the highest order.

I think they meant that you can jump six times higher on the Moon than you can on Earth, all else being equal, on account of the Moon being 1/6 the mass of the Earth, thus with 1/6 the gravity.
We should really applaud McDonald’s for attempting to inject some science in between doses of carbs, fats, sugar and caffeine. This is probably the result of an entry level graphic designer who found some trivia site on the Internet and copy and pasted. Let’s be honest here, the goal of bag art is to carry food make children happy and excited while they eat so they will come to associate happiness with McDonalds. So it’s further proof that kids have an innate love of astronomy in that such a major company wants to associate itself with it. But this is the part that makes it downright funny:

I grew up in Texas, where Baylor’s College of Medicine is supposed to be well respected, hard to get into, etc. But I really wonder now. Why are they associated with McDonald’s? Especially when the only mention of anything close to being medical on this bag is that milk can help you grow. Woah! BCM is involved with cutting edge nutritional science! I think these commercials were much more effective.

Is it me, or are the spammers going to have a field day with this one?

Per the pic on the right, I know monkeys can sometimes be found in rockets, but not on them. And they usually aren’t happy about it.

Here is the entire bag:

Side 1
Side 2

The other two sides were about dinosaurs. I wonder if there is a Slacker Vertebrate Paleontology site out there…

Carl Sagan Blogathon

Today is the 10th anniversary of Carl Sagan’s death. As ordered by the Carl Sagan Memorial Blogathon, we should be writing something about his death. Unfortunately, a very bad cold virus has me in a Benadryl Haze, so it’s hard to write coherently. I should say, harder to write coherently, but we try anyway…

I never had the fortune of meeting Dr. Sagan since my astronomy career took off after he died. In fact, his death marks an end to my astronomy-exile that runs roughly from adolescence to the mid-twenties. I remember watching him on Larry King just months before he died. He looked thin and frail due to his cancer fight, but at the time was recovering and optimistic.

A close friend of mine attended Cornell, where Dr. Sagan worked. He said he felt bad for guest lecturers who would visit. Carl would introduce them, listen to the talk, then thank them for coming - as any good MC would do. But afterward the students would swarm Carl with questions and requests, leaving the featured speaker in the offing.

I’ve run into more than one person in the industry who has told me that they want to be the next Carl Sagan. At one astro conference in 2003, an entire panel discussion was dedicated to “finding the next Carl Sagan”. Just as his loss is immeasurable, it is impossible to replace him and foolhardy to try.

Carl wasn’t popular because he was smart. He wasn’t popular because he was good looking. He wasn’t popular because he was funny. He wasn’t popular because he was rich and successful.

He was popular because he made it look easy.

Like Michael Jordan and Johnnie Cochran, the greats in their profession make it look easy. Carl Sagan made science seem like it was understandable. There was no reason everyone couldn’t get it. He also made it seem fun, without being geeky.

That is where lots of science popularizers fail. They try cool stunts and stuff and do a good job preaching to the choir. (I’m calling you out, Bill Nye and Mr. Wizard!) This is important stuff, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not going to reach POTS (person-on-the-street = an actual term used in education journals, btw!).

Carl Sagan was cool. He hung out with Rolling Stone editors. He exchanged coded messages with Soviet spies. He smoked dope and wrote about it. He became a feminist. He worked in Hollywood. We can’t recreate that.

Instead, every astronomer (scientist, even) needs to take the personal responsibility to explain what they do in exciting terms to everyone they know. If it takes time, fine. And don’t dumb it down: respect the intelligence of those to whom we are speaking. If every scientist in the world did that - we’d be in a much more enlightened place now. That’s what we need now. Grass roots responsibility. Scientists need to stand up and be counted

The Benadryl Haze is wearing off. Time to sleep and take the fight to the enemy.

Check out the Slackerpedia Galactica Carl Sagan page.
Discuss in the forums here. (forum registration is now fixed)

The Gift of Infinity

Greetings from the Kitt Peak 4m where my grad student and I are using the Mosaic CCD imager to try to locate historical supernova light echoes in our own galaxy! They have a great visitor center here and one of the things I have learned about is their “Advanced Observing Program”. Basically, anyone can pay several hundred dollars a night to have access to one of three telescopes with instruments on them for as many nights as you can afford! Meals and accommodation on the mountain are part of the arrangement and so is full-time technical assistance.

See http://www.noao.edu/outreach/aop/info.html for more details. Kitt Peak is a wonderful observing location and this would be an experience you would never forget.

-Doug

Forum Registration Fixed!

If you tried to register for the forum over the last couple of months and never received e-mail confirmation, please register again. We found and fixed the bug that caused the confirmation to not be sent to some people.