Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal

Well this speaks for itself-

from tiffany jones

Today would be his 75th birthday.

Tomorrow marks the first annual Carl Sagan Day. It will be held at Broward College in the Miami area of Florida. It will be celebrated by people around the world however, by simply pausing to reflect on the life of a man who brought the wonders of Science to millions.

Sagan worried a lot about scientific literacy.  To have a functioning society, where the public makes thoughtful decisions on everything from environmental policy, to the funding of research and exploration, it’s a necessity.

Mouse the image to go to the website.

Science education is not just for those who plan on studying science in college, or going into a field of research!

It’s needed for everyone.

Carl Sagan would be unhappy with the state of science literacy today. Particularly here in America, where large numbers of people believe that solid scientific foundations underpinning evolutionary biology and climate change are wrong.

Where books are published with almost laughable explanations of why these basic theories are supposedly wrong.

A public that has little or no scientific understanding, will not have the ability to recognize when they are being fed a load of political propaganda dressed up to resemble science.

I have written several times about Carl Sagan on these pages. His books and the famous TV series COSMOS are still watched and read by millions. The Pale Blue Dot is simply fabulous.

If you read just one book of his, then buy The Demon Haunted World.

After I published this post today, a viewer sent me a link to this. Feynman playing the Bongos!, Neil De Grasse Tyson, and of course Sagan.

Pause and remember Carl Sagan on Monday. He would have been 75. The world still needs him.

Later,

Dan

Full Sky Panorama by Axel Mellinger : Axel Mellinger, "A Color All-Sky Panorama Image of the Milky Way." PASP 121:855 (Nov. 2009).

Axel Mellinger is a professor and physicist at Central Michigan University, but at night he is an amateur astronomer.

He has compiled an incredible photo of our Milky Way Galaxy and the ENTIRE night sky using over 3000 high resolution photographs. The picture above is a VERY LOW resolution image of his big picture. The new image is the highest resolution

It took him almost two years and travel from South Texas to South Africa and back home to Michigan to get images of every part of the sky visible from the Earth. He then had to map it into a panoramic image and remove distortion, along with filtering out artificial light sources. Not something you really want to start unless you know a lot of  physics first.

Fortunately he did!

The image shows stars that are 1000 times fainter than can be seen with the human eye. He will be making a 648 mega pixel image available to planetariums to show on their domes to thousands of students from age 6 to 90! What a great contribution to science!

Thanks to Eureka alert from SCIENCE and here for the heads up.

This comes on the same day of another big announcement in the astronomical world. The most distant Gamma Ray Burst ever detected was announced in NATURE.

Gamma ray bursts are such stupendously gigantic explosions that their light can travel across the entire visible universe. They are now thought to be the death throws of giant stars, on their way to black hole oblivion.

The image on the left is of a gamma ray burst that is 13.1 Billion light years away. The Universe itself is 13.7 billion years old, so this explosion happened when the universe was a tiny baby. (Well not that tiny, but you know what I mean!).

Now think about something. If an object is 14 billion light years from Earth, can we possibly see it? NO! The universe has only been around for 13.7 billion years. The light has not had time since the universe began to reach us! (Yeah you have to think about that for awhile!)

We are looking back now to the very edge of time itself now.

You gotta know that Alex Filippenko is excited about this!

Who is Alex Filippenko you ask??

Go here and read about RAINDROPS and MISLABELLED FAUCETS

Later,

Dan

View of Opportunity on the surface of Mars! Taken by the Mars recon. Orbiter. NASA JPL

The Mars Rover Opportunity was designed to last 6 months. It’s still driving around Mars 5 years later! Both Spirit and the Opportunity Rover are still functioning, although Spirit is stuck right now in martian quicksand!

Meteorite on Mars. See thumbprints?? Courtesy NASA JPL

In the last few weeks, Opportunity has spotted a couple of meteorites on Mars. Take a look at the pictures!

This looks like an iron meteorite and seems to have the thumb prints that are common with this type. These indentations are caused by the hot ride through the atmosphere and are officially called REGMAGLYPTS. (Yeah it’s pronounced like it looks, and when you figure out how to say it, let me know too!)

Almost all meteorites are magnetic, but not all have as much iron and nickel as others. The regmaglypts tend to only show up in space stones that are almost all metal.

Meteorites are very old, and are of great interest to scientists. They are likely the left over remains of failed planets that did not congeal when our solar system formed. Most are around 4,500 million years old and are one of the clues to Earths age. (About the same)

The latest meteorite found by Opportunity. Click for hires image.

In related news, Steve Squyres the principal investigator for the Mars Rover project as just been awarded the Carl Sagan Medal, for excellence in Planetary Science communication.

Well deserved!!

Check out the apture links on this post for a quick course on meteorites.

These rovers have rewritten the text books on planetary science. If only Sagan had lived to see it!

My favourite picture sent back by them was of cirrus clouds in the martian sky. That, and martian dust devils!

Later,

Dan