Astronomy groupie November 18, 2009

Technology and art bringing the geeks together…

Featured on Wired Science.

Image: The Orion Nebula. / Elias Jordan

We have been amazed by the astrophotos our readers and followers have been sharing with us. So to facilitate our ongoing amazement, and in keeping with our belief that there can never be too many space photos, we have created a new Flickr group for you to upload your favorite shots. We’ll run the best of the bunch on Wired Science periodically so that your work can be properly gawked at by your fellow Wired.com readers.

So join our DIY Astronomy Flickr group, and start wowing us with your nebulas, clusters and galaxies! Our first submission, the Orion Nebula by Elias Jordan, is pictured above. We’ll also be tweeting @wiredscience about your astrophotography, so follow us there.

Art and Science in India November 12, 2009

Another Reason, by Gyan Frakash

From the Science Blog The Primate Diaries:

As Jawaharlal Nehru wrote of his native land but as a stranger in the process of discovery, “India is a geographical and economic entity, a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by invisible threads.” These invisible threads were the spiritual beliefs of the people, the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita and the Manu Smriti. The sacred Ganges was a symbol of India’s life blood, as much for the Indian people as for the British colonialists, that, as Rudyard Kipling described in his story “The Bridge Builders,” was a natural force that needed to be conquered if the British were to successfully impose their hegemony. In this way “Mother Gunga–in irons” became a metaphor for the use of Western science in conquered lands. Princeton historian Gyan Prakash, in his survey of science in colonial India, seeks to show that science was both a means of expanding British control over the region and was a conflict zone that the nationalist elite of India sought to reimagine as an indigenous concept in order to reclaim their land.

Another Reason, as Prakash describes it, is a story of “science’s cultural authority as the legitimating sign of rationality and progress” (7). The colonial state used European science to conquer and exploit India and Prakash reveals how the history of science and the history of Western hegemony are akin to the two snakes intertwined around Hermes’ Caduceus, a symbol of reason and authority that seeks to heal but also to control. This can be seen in the early anthropological studies incorporated as part of the 1869 General Industrial Exhibition that sought to celebrate Western science in conquered lands. George Campbell, ethnologist and governor of Bengal, emphasized the importance of studying the “wild tribes” of the land under his purview because “Of all sciences, the neglected study of man is now recognized as the most important.” The racial politics were very clear, as Campbell explained.

“The world is becoming more and more one great country; race meets race, black with white, the Arian with Turanian and the Negro; and questions of miscegenation or separation are very pressing” (28).

Read the whole original post

Extraterrestrial turbulence November 11, 2009

From the November 2009 issue of Discover Magazine, originally published online October 21, 2009:

Image by: Prof. Paul Woodward, Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota

Stellar turbulence!

This computer-rendered image depicts a Rayleigh-Taylor instability: a turbulent, gravity-driven mixing of fluids that occurs in stars (and in boiling water) when a heavy substance sits atop a lighter one.

Astrophysicists at the University of Minnesota conducted a supercomputer simulation of sun-like stars to model this turbulence, which violently but effectively circulates heat in the region just below the stellar surface.

Martian landscapes November 9, 2009

Whoa. Wow. Etc.

Since 2006, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting Mars, currently circling approximately 300 km (187 mi) above the Martian surface. On board the MRO is HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, which has been photographing the planet for several years now at resolutions as fine as mere inches per pixel. Collected here is a group of images from HiRISE over the past few years, in either false color or grayscale, showing intricate details of landscapes both familiar and alien, from the surface of our neighboring planet, Mars. I invite you to take your time looking through these, imagining the settings – very cold, dry and distant, yet real.

(35 photos total)

A world-changing map November 6, 2009

A little history, a little word play, and a little cartography, plus seeing where Copernicus got some of his crazy ideas. What better way to get your morning started?

Drawn half a millennium ago and then swiftly forgotten, one map made us see the world as we know it today… and helped name America. But, as Toby Lester has discovered, the most powerful nation on earth also owes its name to a pun.

Almost exactly 500 years ago, in 1507, Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure Germanic scholars based in the mountains of eastern France, made one of the boldest leaps in the history of geographical thought – and indeed in the larger history of ideas.

Near the end of an otherwise plodding treatise titled Introduction to Cosmography, they announced to their readers the astonishing news that the world did not just consist of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the three parts of the world known since antiquity. A previously unknown fourth part of the world had recently been discovered, they declared, by the Italian merchant Amerigo Vespucci, and in his honour they had decided to give it a name: America.

But that was just the beginning. Waldseemuller and Ringman in fact had written the Introduction to Cosmography merely as a companion volume to their magnum opus: a giant and revolutionary new map of the world. It’s known today as the Waldseemuller map of 1507.

Read full article

Hubble spots jewel box star cluster October 29, 2009

 

From Wired Science:

This stunning image of the Kappis Crucis Cluster, nicknamed the “Jewel Box,” was one of the last gifts from a retiring camera on the Hubble Space Telescope.

Just before NASA brought the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 back to Earth in mid-2009, it snapped this photo of the core of the NGC 4755 star cluster, the first comprehensive image of an open galactic cluster taken in multiple wavelengths. Using seven different filters, Hubble captured the Jewel Box cluster in far ultraviolet to near-infrared light. The different colors of the stars — from pale blue to bright ruby red — result from their differing intensities at various ultraviolet wavelengths.

Just bright enough to be seen from Earth with the naked eye, the Jewel Box was given its name by English astronomer John Herschel in the 1830’s, who thought the sparkling blue and red stars resembled expensive jewelry. Like most open star clusters, the Jewel Box is made up of an array of sister stars, all formed from the same cloud of gas and dust with similar ages and chemical make-up. Located about 6,400 light-years away, near the Southern Cross in the constellation of Crux, the Jewel Box contains roughly 100 stars.

Besides Hubble, two other telescopes have also recently captured new images of the Jewel Box. A wide-field photo taken by the 2.2-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla observatory in Chile shows the multi-colored cluster surrounded by thousands of neighboring stars. A close-up from ESO’s Very Large Telescope captures the stars in detail and ranks as one of the best images of the Jewel Box ever taken from the ground. Both images can be seen in the composite photo below.

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Image 1: NASA/ESA and Jesús Maíz Apellániz/Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain. Image 2: ESO, NASA/ESA, Digitized Sky Survey 2 and Jesús Maíz Apellániz/Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain.

LCROSS Twitters “Hitchhiker” October 13, 2009

OMG So Cute! From The Guardian:

In one of its less-reported actions last week, Nasa’s LCROSS lunar mission last week gave Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the extra-planetary exposure it has always deserved. A Twitter feed from the satellite sent crashing onto the moon’s surface on Friday channelled the voice of an improbably created sperm whale that discovers itself hurtling towards a different outer-space collision in Adams’s much-loved story.

Published 30 years ago, the classic novel features two missiles, aimed at Zaphod Beeblebrox’s spaceship the Heart of Gold, turned into a whale and a bowl of petunias by the vessel’s Improbability Drive (at an Improbability Factor of 8,767,128 against). The whale spends the last few minutes of its life pondering its existence – “Ahhh! Woooh! What’s happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What’s my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I?” – before it crashes into the surface of the planet Magrathea.

As Nasa’s LCROSS spacecraft travelled towards the moon at more than 9,000 kilometres per hour on Friday afternoon, it tweeted in the whale’s words: “And what’s this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round … it needs a big wide sounding name like ‘Ow’, ‘Ownge’, ‘Round’, ‘Ground’! … That’s it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it’ll be friends with me?”

Then it crashed into the moon, unfortunately failing to produce the 10km plume of dust and rock which could have been scanned for evidence of frozen water. Nasa made no mention of Adams’s bowl of petunias, which thought only “Oh no, not again” as it tumbled towards Magrathea.

Read on…

Twilight Zone turns 50 October 7, 2009

Copyright CBS, Inc.

You are now entering the Twilight Zone of cinema and science!

On October 2, 1959, the first episode aired of what would turn out to be a seminal work of science-fiction television. For the first time the famous four-note musical motif played, and for the first time Rod Serling told viewers that they were “entering a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind.” Yes, it may be hard to believe, but October marks the fiftieth anniversary of the premiere of The Twilight Zone.

The first episode, titled “Where Is Everybody?” and starring Earl Holliman, was written by Serling and very much set the tone for the series: Holliman plays a man, dressed in an Air Force jumpsuit, who wanders about a town that seems to have no other people in it, though has evidence of very recent habitation (food on the stove, burning cigarettes in ashtrays, etc.). It turns out (SPOILER ALERT) that he is imagining the whole thing, and that he’s actually been put in isolation to see if he can stay sane for a trip to the moon.

The latest from Hubble: October 2, 2009

Pretty amazing! The images were taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys instrument before it suffered a power failure in 2007. The images were recovered when astronauts restored the unit in May of this year on the last Hubble Servicing Mission. Both are deep enough to show distant background galaxies.

High-res version of the top photo (40 MB): NGC 4522
High-res version of the  bottom photo (29 MB): NGC 4402

These photos are actually amazing for two reasons:

1. Hubble has once again wowed us with the beauty of nature, and without even trying to has created images the likes of which we’ve only seen in science fiction. The assumption often made, including by this website, is that art has to be manmade. And technically this is; it is an electronic image created by humans for non-altruistic/not-directly-related-to-survival purposes. BUT, sometimes it’s also amazing to just sit back and look at nature, including galaxies far far away, and just be amazed at the gloriousness of the world(s) around us.

2. These photos show the process of “ram pressure stripping,” or basically what happens when galaxies travel at 6.2 million miles per hour (astronomers estimate): their edges start flying off into the nether regions of the Universe.

Wired and Bad Astronomy discussed this phenomenon a little bit.

Free Museum Day tomorrow September 25, 2009

September 26th is Annual Museum Day, and lots of museums and parks are offering free admission in celebration. Read on for more:

On Sept. 26, as part of the fifth annual Museum Day program, Smithsonian magazine has convinced more than 1,200 other museums, zoos, and arts and cultural attractions across the country to also welcome visitors for free.

In California, you’ll can use your Museum Day admission card to visit the classic cars displayed at the California Automobile Museum in Sacramento (regular adult admission: $8), in New York City you can use your pass at the South Street Seaport Museum (regular adult admission: $10), and in Dallas, your pass will get you into the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza (regular admission: $13.50), which explores the assassination and legacy of President John F. Kennedy. 

To see the full list of all the participating museums so you can plan your day, visit the Smithsonian’s Museum Day 2009 Web site and poke around. Be ready to be a bit overwhelmed.