Fearmongering Scientists

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You know how, later this year, the world is going to end on December 21, 2012? Today between 11:00 and 12:00 I heard Astronomer Phil Plait on WHYY internet radio trying to convince us all that it's just not true.

First, he used flimsy arguments to dismiss the arrival of the planet Nibiru, AKA Planet X, which will collide with Earth on that fateful day. According to Dr. Plait, any planet bound by the Sun's gravity (he doesn't explicitly say this, but it's what he meant) which was going to collide with Earth within the next year would be near the orbit of Mars and because of its size (4 times that of Earth) it would be brighter in the sky than Jupiter, which at the moment is easily visible near the moon as a very bright star. He further asserts that such a massive object would have disrupted the orbits of Earth, Mars, and other planets by now with its gravity, something which he says isn't happening.

However, Plait plainly has no idea what he's talking about!

Hello? Reality calling Dr. Phil? Aren't you forgetting something rather important?


Isn't the Solar system a THREE DIMENSIONAL construct? Aren't there things orbiting outside the Ecliptic plane (the plane in which the Earth orbits the Sun)? Isn't it possible that all the telescopes are looking in the wrong place? Couldn't Nibiru be orbiting at an angle oriented -450 degrees from the Ecliptic, and therefore not be where we expect to find it? And if it were there, wouldn't it have a much smaller effect on the planets' orbits, because it was much farther from them? Nibiru doesn't need to collide with the Earth to destroy it, it merely needs to whip past the Sun very quickly, which means it can be traveling far faster than it would otherwise need to if it were going to collide with Earth. Faster speed means it's further still from the distance needed to affect other planets. And maybe they have their cloaking device engaged, the same one Captain Kirk stole from the Romulans.

Simple explanations, really man. You're not fooling anyone.

The self-admitted Bad Astronomer goes on to protest that the increasing activity levels of the Sun have nothing to do with the end of the world. It has been predicted by some that a giant Solar flare will swallow the Earth, burning it to a crisp. Plait dismisses these by claiming there is some sort of cycle to the Sun's activity and that it will reach its peak in 2013 and 2014.

Hello? Even if the Sun wasn't as steady as the day God made it, do you not realize that the Solar Max is merely an average of a prediction, little different than Hurricane Season here on Earth, and that giant solar flares CAN and DO occur at any time, not just during Solar Max, in the same way that hurricanes can and do form outside Hurricane Season?

Really, man, you're being ridiculous here.

And don't you think that if a giant planet whips around the Sun at high speed, making a very close approach, that it might CAUSE giant solar flares?

Plait then goes on to dismiss hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters which could easily be proven to be caused by the gravitational effects of a giant, invisible planet closing in on us at warp speed, claiming that the millions of scientists around the world who know of this could NOT be coopted or threatened to keep their mouths shut by the MIB, Illuminati, and other government stooges who are hiding the TRUTH that Kennedy was assassinated by Yetis fighting for Tibetan independence.

Yeah, right, Phil. Tell me another one.

Worst of all, Plait then tries to put the burden of proof on those who make what he calls "outlandish claims". First he calls them whackos, then expects them to act in a logical and mature fashion by WORKING to prove something which can be easily seen as the truth with the application of just a little imagination and no small dollop of heroin.

Phil, Phil, Phil. What am I going to do with you? I'll bet you expect your children to show their work on their math homework to "prove" they understand how to get the answer. I'll bet you expect your children to speak English in your house. I'll even bet that at one time you expected your children to appreciate all you've done for them. How cruel and selfish of you. The world doesn't need adults who are capable of rational thought, nor those capable of taking responsibility for themselves! What the world needs is more heroes like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian and Snooki. It needs people who willingly, EAGERLY believe every con job the television and the internet sell them. Really, Phil, how do you expect the super-rich to continue to oppress us if we suddenly realized how ridiculous it was to believe they have our best interests at heart while they're robbing us blind?

What really took the cake for me, personally, as a pseudo-journalist who often invents sensational news stories in an effort to get people to click on my ads so I can make some money off their panic, is that he would interfere in the right of someone to seek a certain, relatively painless death for themselves or their children instead of waiting to see if the prognostications come to pass and possibly suffering a horrible death from being flung into space when the Earth's rotation comes to a sudden halt. Nibiru will be easily observed and its effects felt months before the end. If someone's brain is so defective that they can't stand to wait for the inescapable truth one way or the other, and choose to endure eternal damnation by killing themselves instead of letting God do it at the time of His choosing, then the gene pool will be that much cleaner when the survivors try to rebuild society.

The end is so obviously nigh, Phil Plait, Bad Astronomer. The "proof" you seek is coming. Will you keep denying it with your "rationality" four days later just because Santa Claus visited your house? I'll bet you will.

You're going to be awfully embarrassed when the world ends and you tried to keep people calm and realistic. There's no place for that sort of thing on this planet or any other. I suppose next he'll be telling us the world is warming up and the polar bears are dying off because there's no longer enough ice at the North Pole to block the Northwest Passage.

I will pray for your soul in the coming apocalypse, Phil.
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Atlantis Airborne

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Space Shuttle Atlantis has blasted off from Florida's Kennedy Space Center just a few minutes ago on its final launch! The weather around here wasn't all that great - too many clouds and the possibility of continuing storms - but the weather around Titusville was good enough that, with only a minor delay, the shuttle launched. I imagine the million or so people who came to see it would have preferred a clearer sky, but I doubt any of them regret their cross-country trips to witness this historic event. It was a very emotional moment for a lot of people.

I didn't go down there, nor did I head over to the beach. When you watch it on TV, you get the best views and you get to see the view FROM the shuttle! Having attended several launches from multiple locations, I know how awesome it is to watch a launch without benefit of the TV, even when the clouds swallow it immediately. If you're close enough to see it, you're also close enough to feel it. You'll also hear it, although if you're far away, it will take a while for the sound to reach you, and hopefully you're not in a loud place.

Up close, it's the biggest blowtorch you've ever seen. You can FEEL the heat from the engines, even from several miles away. (I'll swear up and down that you can feel it from 50 miles away!) Then comes the rumble, loud enough to overwhelm any other sounds.

As the shuttle climbs on a pillar of fire, disappearing far faster than you can really imagine, that sound slowly fades, but you can still feel it pulsing the air. It takes only about two minutes before that gigantic burst of light is so far away that you can't see it any more, and the world resumes moving.

If you're farther away, you can watch the launch, and it's incredible to watch it move across the sky so rapidly, but then when the sound reaches you, it's like experiencing it a second time.

But, no more will you be able to experience this. Maybe in the future there will be a replacement vehicle, but in the meantime, we will have to tide ourselves over with smaller rockets.

Good luck, Atlantis crew!

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Solar System - Asteroids

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Things you don't know about the Solar System

I've always found space fascinating, and among my first books was a book about astronomy. It was just a small, general guide that had a number of interesting facts about the solar system and the stars and galaxies. This was 1980 or before, and we've made a LOT of discoveries since then, and I've kept up on it, partly thanks to Ars Technica, the Science Channel, and NASA.

Today's topic: Asteroids! No, not the video game, not the movies, but real asteroids.
 
Howdy, pardner! Welcome to the wild world of asteroid belting! We'll be mining those big chunks of rock and making money hand over fist in no time!

I'll bet you thought our next stop after the red planet would be the big planet, Jupiter, but you're wrong, buddy boy. Our next step away from the Sun is to the asteroid belt, where valuable minerals are just sitting there, waiting for us to grab them and use them.

The popular picture of the asteroid belt is that it's a huge collection of rocks just floating around, waiting to smash a passing spacecraft. This image comes from the movies, most notably The Empire Strikes Back, where the Millennium Falcon has to dodge through these crazily hurting masses and TIE fighters get smashed up for not being better pilots.

The reality is much more pedestrian. Much more like the asteroid encounter scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sure, there's a lot of rocks, and sure, they do collide with each other, but that's over the course of millions of years, not on a minute-by-minute basis. And what's more, we've sent about a dozen spacecraft through it and, except when we intentionally crashed on one, never came within a million miles of one.

One other persistent myth is that there's enough mass out there to make a good-sized planet, which has been named Phaeton. The reality is that all the asteroids in the belt wouldn't add up to something the size of Pluto, which isn't even considered a planet any more.

But that doesn't mean the asteroids aren't valuable. As tiny planet-like objects, some of them will have a lot of useful minerals, like iron and titanium. Some will have oxygen or water. Most will be almost worthless piles of dirt and dust, but there's a good chance of finding a few that will pay for the trouble of going up there.

Ceres, the largest of the asteroids, is now considered to be a dwarf planet, just like Pluto now is. There are quite a few of these dwarf planets in our solar system, and Ceres isn't the largest, but it's the closest to us, and it's likely to be the most important object in that area. Because it's so big, it's very likely to have a lot of good minerals to recover.

As a dwarf planet, Ceres is so large that it has enough gravity to be roughly spherical in shape, but not enough to clear out its orbit of most other debris, and so form Phaeton.

One more thing about asteroids: there are a lot more of them than the ones in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. They're all over the Solar system, and many of them orbit near Earth. In fact, many of them cross Earth's orbit every year, and one of them might crash into us in a few years. Many are discovered right after passing close by - some closer than the moon is to us. Should one of these impact the Earth, it would be a very bad day, and no one would see it coming.

I don't know about you, but I'd like it if someone started actively scanning the heavens for all the asteroids that could impact the Earth. Despite what some of the movies would have you believe, there is no such effort, and a bad day can happen with zero warning right now. If you think this is important, start bugging your congress-critter to do something useful instead of trying to destroy the country with health care "reform".

Until next time!
















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Further reading to whet your appetite for knowledge:
Solar System - Sun
To Your Health - Part 4
Solar System - Mars

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Solar System - Mars

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Things you don't know about the Solar System

I've always found space fascinating, and among my first books was a book about astronomy. It was just a small, general guide that had a number of interesting facts about the solar system and the stars and galaxies. This was 1980 or before, and we've made a LOT of discoveries since then, and I've kept up on it, partly thanks to Ars Technica, the Science Channel, and NASA.

Today's topic: the Red Planet, Mars.


Named for the Roman god of war, Mars may be the next Solar system body that humans set foot on. A few years back, the Bush administration, otherwise known for its hard stance against science, announced the race to Mars. Assuming the world doesn't end in 2012 or 2036, humans should be setting foot on Mars by 2030AD or close to that. And what do you think we're going to find there?

It wouldn't be too hard to tell you something you might not know about Mars that comes from recent news releases. We've got some rovers and probes exploring the planet, and they make discoveries almost every day. As of this writing, the debate still rages whether or not there is or was life on Mars, and whether or how much water is on Mars, but one thing is definitely clear: it had water in its ancient past, and so there may have been microbial life.

But I'm going to tell you something that you can't find hardly anywhere, and certainly not in the news: the Martian atmosphere is a natural laser.

Yep, you heard right! It's a laser.

Laser, as I'm sure all of you know, is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, and it's so commonly used nowadays that it's become a word in its own right.

The Mars laser was discovered back in 1981 (according to this article, which also mentions that Venus' atmosphere is a natural laser too, so hey, I learned something new today too) and since then, it's been one of those little-known facts. The article I linked explains how the lasers work, so I won't repeat them.

Something else you might not know about Mars is that it has two moons. They're both really small, more like captured asteroids, though we haven't studied them well enough to know that for sure yet. The neat thing is that one of them orbits so fast that it crosses the Martian sky twice in a day. This is the moon Phobos, and it's the larger of the two. It's so fast, it travels from west to east! The smaller one, Deimos, is further out and behaves more like a moon should, except that it's so small, it's hard to see.

In about 10 million years, Phobos could crash into Mars, assuming we don't do something about it, though it will probably be torn apart and become a ring a couple million years before that. Deimos, like our own moon, is eventually going to escape its parent planet.

If you missed the start of this series, you can use the links to the left and select the SPACE tag to show you all the space-oriented postings I've done. Our tour starts at the Sun and proceeds outward.

Next time, I'll move outward again and learn you something else you don't know about our solar system. Until then, keep reaching for the sky!

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Further reading to whet your appetite for knowledge:
Solar System - Asteroids
To Your Health - Part 3
Solar System - Earth

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Solar System - Earth

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Things you don't know about the Solar System

I've always found space fascinating, and among my first books was a book about astronomy. It was just a small, general guide that had a number of interesting facts about the solar system and the stars and galaxies. This was 1980 or before, and we've made a LOT of discoveries since then, and I've kept up on it, partly thanks to Ars Technica, the Science Channel, and NASA.

Today's topic: the third rock from the Sun, known to the locals as Earth.

There's a lot about the Earth you don't know. I could fill the entire internet with that kind of thing, and in fact, lots of people are doing just that. So instead of me giving you a list of interesting physical facts about the place you live, I thought I'd share with you an essay I wrote many years ago for school, to help human minds grasp just how enormous the universe is. Enjoy!

We are Tiny

We are tiny. The world we live in is huge. We don’t really grasp how small we are, because we can see maps of the whole world, and we can travel to the other side of it in the space of a few hours or days. We can drive a mile in a minute or less, we can fly a mile in a few seconds, we have spacecraft that can travel a few miles in 1 second, but what if you had to walk? It takes about a third of an hour to walk a mile. Not a whole lot of time in the scale of our lives, but we get tired of it after only a few miles. It would take about two years to walk all the way around the Earth.

There are a lot of things on the Earth that you have never seen before, and may have read about in books, but what about if you hadn’t had those books? You would think these things mostly tall tales, told to amuse children, or the boastings of drunks. It would take too much time and money to go traveling. Something like Disneyland would be a life’s aspiration rather than one choice among many.

The Solar system today is much like the Earth of just 100 years ago. Sure, spacecraft can fly several miles in a second, but with the number of miles to travel, we may as well be walking. It takes days just to reach our nearest celestial neighbor: the moon. It takes months or years to reach the world we are most likely to colonize next: Mars. It would take centuries or millennia to reach the closest visible star: Alpha Centauri. This is a journey the likes of which no one has ever experienced, and no one can really imagine it.

Our knowledge is growing. As we before could not imagine traveling to the ends of the Earth in a mere day, one day we may be able to go much faster than we do now. But even if we are able to instantaneously reach the speed of light itself, the nearest star is still over 4 years away, a journey even Magellan and Drake did not know, and there will be no stops along the way to reprovision or let the crew out to relax and blow off steam.

The galaxy is huge. At the speed of light, it would take about 100,000 years to cross it. This is a journey so huge the mind cannot hope to comprehend it. Along the way, you would see strange things that you didn’t think were possible, and people you tell your stories to would not believe you.

Let us suppose it is possible to build a warp drive, capable of traveling 1000 times the speed of light. A journey to Alpha Centauri would take only a day and a half; still a long time by today’s standards, and no reason to commute to work; it would be equivalent to a long train ride, from one side of a continent to the other. The galaxy-spanning trip still requires 100 years to accomplish.

So let us build a warp drive that travels a million times the speed of light. It now takes about 5 weeks to cross the galaxy; an hour’s travel will carry you over 26 lightyears away; there are an awful lot of visible stars within that range, and quite a few more that we don’t yet know about.

But even at this incredible speed, to reach our galactic neighbor Andromeda would still take 225 years! If we bump up to a billion times the speed of light, the trip takes less than 3 months, meaning intergalactic colonization becomes possible, and we can commute to any place in our own galaxy. It would take only 10-20 years to reach the edge of the universe itself*, a trip so important that you know some one will attempt it.

But until that time, when we can travel almost instantly to almost anywhere, we must remember that the world is a big place. The local group of the closest stars is a big place. The galaxy is a big place, and it will take a long time for it to become small. Until it does, think of space travel as what travel was like before mass production of the automobile: not very fast.

* Recently (2009), I have learned that the most current estimate for the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years, HOWEVER, the universe has been expanding considerably in all that time such that it is approximately 39 billion lightyears to reach the edge of the VISIBLE universe, and the ACTUAL edge may be another billion or two further out. Still, a journey that lasts less than 100 years (there and back) to discover something so important is almost certain to be attempted.

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Further reading to whet your appetite for knowledge:
Solar System - Mars
Hey baby, what's your sign? (Updated!)
Solar System - Venus
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Space Links

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Over the past few months, I've unveiled a few facts about the Solar system you don't know and might not be able to find from casual looking. This month, I want to give you some resources to look up some of this stuff, and to answer the questions that I'm intentionally not answering for you. There's a lot of cool stuff to know.

Did you know that it was because of studying Venus that we discovered the possibility of a runaway Greenhouse Effect? Did you know that the Sun has recently started doing some really strange things? Did you know that, even though the universe is about 14 billion years old, and that nothing can travel faster than light, it's 93 billion light-years across?

The Solar System is filled with fascinating and mysterious objects. Studying Venus was our first clue that a runaway greenhouse effect was possible, and is merely one tiny example of how studying our local space environment can help improve the quality of life on Earth. There’s lots more we need to know, not the least of which is WHEN (not IF) another huge rock is going to hit our planet. Earth is the biggest solid object in the Solar System, and as such, it gets hit far more often than smaller planets, and I think we can all see that the Moon has been hit quite a bit, with its giant craters, so it’s a good idea to find all the rocks that might hit us and get them moved out of our way. As cool as it would be to find aliens with the SETI project, I think this is a little more important.

In the past few years, we’ve built some very interesting telescopes that have allowed us to finally see planets revolving around other stars. We are finding them all over the place, with new ones being spotted literally every day.

We’ve spotted gigantic stars that are so huge they could engulf our Sun and all 9 planets. We’ve spotted star-sized diamonds. We’ve seen galaxies explode. We’ve seen objects traveling very nearly the speed of light. We’ve discovered gigantic black holes, and one of them is at the center of our own galaxy! We’re even peering back to the very beginnings of Time and the Universe themselves, and we’ve got a pretty good picture of how and when the Universe was born and how it’s going to die.

Astronomy is the biggest science, it has provided us with inventions like Velcro, scratch-resistant lenses, CCDs, and satellite protections against the Sun, and it receives very little funding for the myriad of benefits derived from its study. Here is a small list of some of NASA’s contributions to life on Earth.

With all the cool stuff that’s out there to explore, and all the useful stuff we’ve learned already, I don’t know why everyone isn’t trying to be an astronomer!

I’ll be adding more content here as I find interesting things that aren’t widely known; that’s what I’m all about: doing things no one or hardly anyone does. Those of you who want to know more incredible facts about our solar system, our galaxy, and our universe, would be well advised to visit these sites:

Badastronomy.com

Space.com

Wikipedia has lots of interesting articles, just do a search for the planet or star in question. Frex:

             Pistol Star

             What a black hole is

             What stars are

             The Pillars of Creation

             Mars

          Size of the Universe

This is just a SMALL sample of the awesomeness out there available for your discovery. And if you get the Science Channel, they often have astronomy-related programs to watch.

Oh, and if you want to feel small, watch this video.

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Further reading to whet your appetite for knowledge:
Solar System - Sun
Hey baby, what's your sign? (Updated!)
Solar System - Earth

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Solar System - Venus

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Things you don't know about the Solar System

I've always found space fascinating, and among my first books was a book about astronomy. It was just a small, general guide that had a number of interesting facts about the solar system and the stars and galaxies. This was 1980 or before, and we've made a LOT of discoveries since then, and I've kept up on it, partly thanks to Ars Technica, the Science Channel, and NASA.

I'm going to present a few curious things to you about what surrounds you that I'll bet you don't know. It's time to discover the hottest planet: Venus.

Known in ancient times as both the Morning Star and the Evening Star, Venus is one of the brightest objects in the sky. When Galileo turned his telescope upon it, he discovered that it went through phases, just like the Moon. It does this because it's closer to the Sun than we are - Mercury also goes through phases, but the outer planets do not.

Better telescopes revealed that Venus was about the same size as Earth, and that it was covered in clouds. It gained the name of Earth's Twin, or even Sister Planet, because of this. It was believed for a long time that with it being of similar size and with clouds that it was probably like Earth, only warmer. When space probes finally reached it, they discovered it was just about the worst place you could be! The temperature was over 800 degrees - hotter than Mercury even though it's twice as far away from the Sun! - and the atmosphere was crushing - 90 times the pressure of Earth's atmosphere - and it was mostly carbon dioxide, plus the winds were constantly howling at supersonic speeds and the clouds were too thick for much light to get to the surface.

It wasn't until we started turning our radars on the planet that we made an interesting discovery: Venus rotates backwards! Very slowly! They also discovered something else: Venus always points the same face at Earth.

Okay, that's not precisely true; here’s a more accurate statement: When Venus is closest to the Earth, it always points the same face at Earth. Because Venus is so covered in clouds that we can’t ever see the surface, except by bouncing radar signals off it, we didn’t know this until fairly recently.

Some of you may be aware that Venus rotates “backwards”, or “retrograde”. The Earth and most other solar-system bodies, when viewed from above the North Pole, spin counter-clockwise, but Venus spins clockwise instead. The Sun, if it was visible from Venus’ surface, would go from west to east.

Venus needs 225 Earth-days (about 7.5 months) to revolve around the Sun, and 243 Earth-days (usually listed as -243 days to denote that it rotates backwards) (about 8 months) to rotate 360 degrees. Its “day” is a little longer than its “year”.

Because it takes Venus 2/3 of an Earth-year to rotate, and about that long for Venus to go around the Sun, Venus comes closest to Earth in the same part of the sky every 2 Earth-years. In this time, Venus has gone around the Sun 3 times and also had three full “days”. The same side of Venus is always facing toward Earth when the two approach!

Future study of the planet is likely to reveal that this is not a coincidence, but rather that there is probably a concentration of mass on Venus that Earth “grabs onto”, in much the same way as the near-side of the Moon is heavier than the far side. Over billions of years, Earth’s gravity grabbed hold of these mass concentrations and caused both Venus and the Moon to always face this way on a regular basis. Chances are good that in its past, Venus rotated much like Earth does, then got hit by something big enough to cause it to slow down enough for Earth to grab hold of it and create this interesting 3-to-2 resonance.

I'm going to tell you one more interesting thing about Venus that you don't know: It's possible to live there without terraforming it. How? I'm glad you asked!

You know that Earth's atmosphere is about 100 miles thick, right? And that the higher you go, the thinner the air is, right? The same is true of other planets. Even though the atmospheric pressure on the surface of Venus is 90 times that of Earth, a few dozen miles above that there is a point where it's a lot closer to Earth-normal pressure. By living in what amounts to giant balloons, we could build floating habitats - not much different from living in ships, which we do all the time here on Earth. The conditions in this band are a lot less hostile. The temperatures are better, and the clouds and storms are at a lower level, so it's calmer too. Plus, it's a lot easier to gather sunlight! It might even rain real water up there!

Okay, that's all I've got from Venus for you. Later!

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Further reading to whet your appetite for knowledge:
Solar System - Earth
Solar System - Mercury
To Your Health - Part 2

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Solar System - Mercury

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Things you don't know about the Solar System

I've always found space fascinating, and among my first books was a book about astronomy. It was just a small, general guide that had a number of interesting facts about the solar system and the stars and galaxies. This was 1980 or before, and we've made a LOT of discoveries since then, and I've kept up on it, partly thanks to Ars Technica, the Science Channel, and NASA.

I'm going to present a few curious things to you about what surrounds you that I'll bet you don't know. It's time to discover the planet closest to the Sun and therefore the hardest to observe: Mercury.


Mercury is the fastest planet, swinging around the Sun in just under 3 months. It's so close that it's within the Sun's warped space. For a long time, people thought there was an even-closer planet that was perturbing Mercury's orbit, a truly hellish world they dubbed Vulcan.
However, Vulcan was never discovered, because it wasn't there to be found, yet Mercury's orbit was still not conforming to Newton's predictions. Something else was going on. It wasn't until Einstein's Theory of Relativity that the answer was found.

You've heard that a circle is 360 degrees around, right? Well, massive objects like the Sun distort the space around them. Close to the Sun, where Mercury is, a complete circle is slightly less than 360 degrees, and as a result, Newton couldn't predict where Mercury would be.

Here's something else you don't know about Mercury: it experiences a double sunrise and a double sunset every day. How? This will only take a moment to explain.

Mercury is a big rock, much like the Moon, except it’s really hot because it’s so close to the Sun. The Earth’s distance to the Sun, the famous 93 million miles, has a much easier name to remember, called the AU, which means Astronomical Unit. Earth is 1 AU from the Sun. Mercury is about 2/5 of this distance, and as a consequence, it zooms around the Sun in only 88 Earth-days, which is just under 3 months.

Mercury rotates very slowly compared to Earth. The Earth rotates in 24 hours - one day - but Mercury needs about 59 Earth-days to turn a full 360 degrees. This means a Mercury-day is very long, about 2 months.

Did you notice something there? Its day is 2 months and its year is 3 months? That means that Mercury has 3 “days” for every 2 “years”. Those are incredibly long days!

One other thing you need to know: in its travels around the Sun, Mercury’s orbit is not a perfect circle. Sometimes it’s closer to the Sun than normal, and sometimes it’s farther away. When it’s closer, it goes faster, and when it’s farther, it goes slower. This makes its orbit somewhat elliptical.

You’re already aware that the Moon always keeps the same side facing the Earth, right? This is because the Moon’s “day” is equal to it’s “year”. However, because the Moon also doesn’t have a perfectly circular orbit, this means that sometimes the Moon goes faster and sometimes it goes slower, and because of this, it’s possible to see more than 50% of the Moon’s surface from Earth over the course of a year. Here’s a page and animation I found that explains and shows this wobble...

Click here to see the Moon’s libration!

When Mercury rotates, the Sun comes up over the horizon very slowly. When it is close to the Sun, its increased orbital speed is fast enough that when seen from the ground, the Sun goes back down! Then when the planet moves farther away from the Sun, it slows down and now the sunrise can continue. The same thing happens in reverse on the other side of the planet with the sunset.

To put it another way, the Sun heads west across the sky, then when Mercury is close to the Sun and outrunning its rotation, the Sun goes east for a while, then when Mercury moves away from the Sun, the Sun heads west again.

And so, Mercury’s double-sunrise and double-sunset are caused by this combination of very slow rotation, very fast revolution around the Sun, and orbiting faster than it can spin for a small part of the local “day”.

It’s important to note that, because of the relationship between its “day” and it’s “year” — it’s a ratio of 3 to 2 known as a resonance — this means that these doubles are visible only from small portions of the planet’s surface, and nowhere else. Anywhere else on the day side, you’ll instead see the Sun going backwards for a little while before it resumes its trek across the sky. This isn’t like a Solar eclipse of the Moon, which can happen pretty much anywhere on Earth in narrow swaths for a given event; if you build your house somewhere on Mercury where you saw a double-sunrise, you’ll always be able to see these double sunrises from your house every other “year”.

I haven’t done the math to see if double-sunrises and double-sunsets can be seen from the same locations, but it seems unlikely.

Bonus points for those of you who were also able to figure out that, on certain small locations on the Moon, you can watch the Earth rise and fall over the horizon over the course of a lunar “day” in the same manner!

I think that's enough knowledge to boggle your mind about Mercury. Next up: Venus.

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Further reading to whet your appetite for knowledge:
Solar System - Venus
Solar System - Sun
To Your Health - Part 1

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Solar System - Sun

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Things you don't know about the Solar System

I've always found space fascinating, and among my first books was a book about astronomy. It was just a small, general guide that had a number of interesting facts about the solar system and the stars and galaxies. This was 1980 or before, and we've made a LOT of discoveries since then, and I've kept up on it, partly thanks to Ars Technica, the Science Channel, and NASA.

I'm going to present a few curious things to you about what surrounds you that I'll bet you don't know. Let's start with the giver of all known life: the Sun.


The Sun is a great big ball of hot gas that sits at the center of our solar system. All the planets orbit around it. In fact, we call it Sol, and that's where the name Solar system comes from, but it's a term that, at least in science fiction circles, is used to describe any star and its orbiting companions.

The next thing you don't know about the Sun is that there is an area outside the Sun that is much much hotter than the surface. The surface is in the range of 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but the corona, which surrounds the Sun, is a couple MILLION degrees! How can this be? So far, no one knows.

The last new thing I'm going to tell you about the Sun (for now) is that, for a long time, there have been some missing neutrinos. A neutrino is a tiny particle that can pass through practically any amount of matter without noticing it - a wall of lead several LIGHT-YEARS thick, would be needed to ensure all neutrinos were blocked - and so they are a good indicator of what's going on inside the Sun. It takes a photon - a particle of light - millions of years to reach the Sun's surface, but neutrinos pass through without delay.

For a long time, scientists' theories on how the Sun worked required that it produce a certain number of neutrinos per hour, but they were only able to detect about 1/3 as many as they predicted they would. Just recently, they came upon the solution: there are three different KINDS of neutrinos, and we could only detect one of those three. But now that we can detect the other two, we've found that the Sun is producing as many neutrinos as were predicted.

Oh, okay, one more thing to add. I recently saw a movie with a really stupid plot - or rather, a plot with no basis whatsoever in science. It seems an alien robotic race built a huge weapon on Earth that was capable of destroying the Sun. Yeah. Um, hey, Michael Bay, do you have any concept what would be required for the Sun to even notice us? Let's see some numbers:

The Sun weighs a third of a MILLION times the Earth. That's not 10 times, not 100 times, not 1000 times, that's about 333,000 times! If we gathered together every single nuclear weapon ever built, that would be a force of about 10,000 megatons of TNT. The "Dinosaur Killer" asteroid was 10,000 times as much as that, or about 100 million megatons. In a single second, the Sun produces another 1500 times as much energy, or about 150 billion megatons. Every single second! I don't care what you say, your Sun-destroyer is a pop-gun, and just using it would have to blow up the planet. Dude, stars eat planets without noticing. You're not going to blow one up with a big gun. God, man, think for a change!

And before you can say "antimatter", to produce that kind of energy is equivalent to denotating 4 million tons of antimatter per second. The only way you're going to create that kind of energy is with another star. Everything else literally pales in comparison.

Ok, that's all for the Sun and my rant about junk-science. Now let's move onward and outward, to Mercury!

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Further reading to whet your appetite for knowledge:
Solar System - Mercury
Space Links
To Your Health - Part 1

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My Travels - Florida

"I've been everywhere, man, I've been everywhere!" - Johnny Cash

Not literally - at least, not yet - but as of this writing, I've been to 42 US states, 2 US territories, 11 countries, 4 continents, 2 oceans, and 7 seas. I'm going to take you to some of the places I've been, in no particular order. Sometimes this will be a place I just was, and sometimes it's a place I haven't been to in a while.

Next up: Florida. (Big surprise, huh?)

“Florida knows how to handle hurricanes because it’s filled with Floridians.” - Governor Jeb Bush, 2004, after 5 hurricanes hit the state in rapid succession.

Florida. It sounds beautiful without you even having been there or known what it was named for, doesn’t it? But you know Florida is jam-packed with things to see and do, and that’s why I love it so much. I've been to almost every part of the state without the accompaniment of my truck.

When we were little, my dad took us down there to see my grandparents every year, and we usually went to one or two theme parks and deep-sea fishing and other stuff. Our total round trip was typically over 3000 miles over the course of 2 weeks. It was a lot of fun, the kind he now gets to share with his grandkids and other friends and family who come see him now and then.

It wasn’t until I moved to Florida in 2004 that I got to experience a hurricane, and then I got to experience THREE hurricanes in that first month, and even saw one come back for a second try. I've since been in a couple more, including the eye of a very slow-moving one; it was like a normal day inside!

I like Florida so much, I made scenarios in two different railroad games that feature the state. One is for a little game called “Rails”, based on the “Empire Builder” boardgame (I have a post in the forum dedicated to the game too), and the other was for Railroad Tycoon 2 Platinum, but I haven’t released it to the general public yet (I will eventually).

Everglades National Park: (Official link, Wiki, Other Site of Interest)

“There are no other Everglades in the world. They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth; remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them... ” - Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Miss Marjorie, the world-renowned Grand Dame of the Everglades, is totally right. Nowhere else in the world is there anything like the Everglades. Nowhere else in the world do salt-water and fresh-water crocodiles mingle. Nowhere else is there a river a hundred miles wide, a hundred miles long, and only a couple inches deep. It’s unique, and it’s disappearing. Development consumed a considerable amount of the Everglades, but in 1947 the US government set aside most of what remained as a protected preserve. There’s still a considerable amount of it to see, and it’s not at all like a Louisiana swamp.

I went down there in August of 2006 with my dad as sort of a birthday present for him. There are plenty of places you can ride an airboat through the slough. A slough is a wide, shallow river which is chock full of reeds and weeds and other grasses and a few open spots of water. Our ride included a stop to a small island in the middle of the slough where Indians had made a hideout long ago. There was a guy was playing with a gator and a small, abandoned village.

We also drove along one of the alleys and encountered three gators sunning themselves on the road. It’s funny; as a truck driver, I see a lot of thrown treads on the road, and these are referred to as gators, so when we saw the first one, our minds dismissed it as nothing, until it ran off and jumped back into the swamp. The same thing happened to the second one; we just didn’t see it. But the third time, we saw it, and tried to creep up on it, but it must’ve been nervous, because it ran off well before we got close enough for a good picture.

Along the southwest edge you have a lot of little islands, and we arrived in time to take a boat tour of the coastal area. We got to see some dolphins — almost got close enough to touch them! — and learn a little bit about the ecology of that area and how it’s different from the rest of the ‘glades.

We spent the whole day there, taking a couple tours, the airboat ride, and the regular boat ride, and there were a few things we didn’t get to do, but it was interesting, peaceful, and we had a good day. Dad even got to buy his Federal Park Pass, which entitles him to enter any federal park for free! (Next stop: Yellowstone!)

  

 The Florida Keys and Key West: (Official Site, Wikipedia, Other Site of Interest)

“Helping others is like helping yourself.” - Henry Flagler

In 1912, a year before his death, Henry Flagler, Florida’s greatest railroad tycoon and already plenty rich from his Standard Oil days, completed the Overseas Railroad, which linked Key West, a city of 30,000, to the mainland by rail. Having already built a rail line all the way along the Atlantic coast, from Jacksonville to Miami, complete with some of the grandest hotels ever built, this linked Key West to the rest of the nation! Unfortunately, in 1935 a hurricane destroyed some of the bridges. Later, the US bought the remaining bridges and constructed what is now US1 using much of what Flagler had built. You can still see a few of the old rail bridges where they weren’t reused.

The trip to Key West is interesting. You’re island-hopping without an airplane or Douglas MacArthur, and you’re not going to meet the Imperial Japanese Navy anywhere along the way either. Many of the keys have some signs of civilization, or some parks you can park in. You can camp out about 30-50 miles east of Key West, or you can continue on and pay for an expensive motel room; your choice. If I recall correctly, you can camp out at Bahia Honda, which is about 30 miles from Key West.

In the city of Islamorada, on the north end of Upper Matecumbe Key, there is a seafood buffet restaurant called the Whale Harbor. I’ve been to a few such restaurants, including the good ones in Norfolk, Virginia, that I enjoyed visiting while stationed there, and this one was at least as good; it ought to be, considering where it is!

Key West itself is a quiet little historical tourist town, reminiscent of some quieter place, like Fowler, Indiana, but with coastline and everything that comes along with that. There is a LOT to see and do there; you could spend a whole week, I’m sure. We only spent 3 days.

There are a lot of interesting things about Key West. It was one of the richest cities in the whole country, thanks to the coral reef; the only living one in the whole continental United States. No, not because of tourism, but because ships ran aground on it frequently, and the wreckers would go out and rescue people and salvage their cargo for themselves. The southern-most point of the continental United States is also on the Key, there are glass-bottom boat tours of the coral reef, there’s a lighthouse you can go to the top of, and Hemingway used to live on the island. And that’s just the stuff I got to see in the one day I spent there!

Ft. Lauderdale: (Official Site, Wikipedia, Other Site of Interest)

My first visit here was in 1998 as part of the Air and Sea Show. Bataan sailed down to participate. During the show, we sat off the coast and watched the airplanes, and later we pulled in and gave tours of the ship. I would’ve expected we’d have helicopter or Harrier operations, but we didn’t. They won’t let people be on the flight deck during air operations, but it’s neat to see if you can. Those of us not on tour duty were allowed to go ashore and see the town. It’s not too much different from most of the other coastal Spring Break Vacation spots, like Daytona Beach and Panama City; there’s a strip with a ton of shops, and then there’s the rest of the city, which I didn’t get to see.

The next year, we came back and did it again! That time, several members of my family were able to come down and experience it with me, including going out into the ocean on our boat! An experience few civilians will ever forget.

Unfortunately, because it’s been so long since I’ve been there, I don’t remember a whole lot about the place. We went to a couple tourist spots, we went to the beach, and we just relaxed.

Kennedy Space Center (Official Site, Wikipedia, Other Site of Interest, Other Site of Interest)

“Be an optimist — at least, until they start moving animals in pairs to Cape Canaveral.” - Unknown

I’ve been a space-junkie pretty much all my life. There is no planetarium I won’t go to if I can, nor any space center. I know all the names of all the shuttles and I used to know all the important statistics about them. I used to know several of the astronauts’ names, I have met the parents of one of them, and I would probably faint if I ever met Buzz Aldrin. I used to draw the space shuttle often, and had several space shuttle toys and models. I've even got a whole series of articles on this site devoted to space. So going to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral is a big thrill for me every time I go.

They built it in a swamp in order to create a national nature preserve around the area, and they have some rare and endangered birds that live there.

You can get tours of the place, even to the launch pads (as long as there’s nothing on the pad) and they have several pads there. On their 50-some pads, they launch “normal” rockets, plus they also launch the Space Shuttles from two of the pads there. A few years back, they built a landing runway to save on costs associated with transporting the shuttle back from Edwards Air Force Base. The crawlers they use to move the shuttles from the Assembly Building to the launch pads are enormous!

If you go on a day when there’s a launch, you’ll be in for a crowd, but you’ll also be in for a treat. A rocket launch, and especially a shuttle launch, is a sight to see! There are only a few more shuttle launches scheduled, and then the program is going to be decommissioned while they build the next generation of launch vehicles, so if you want to see one, you’d better plan for it right now and get down there.

There are several tours you can take while you’re there, and it feels only a little like an amusement park. The tour that I’ve been on takes you to a close observation post about a mile or so from the launch pads, and one time, we got to get there about half an hour after the crawler had passed by (they delayed the tours until it got past), and it was carrying a space shuttle! So I’ve gotten pretty close to the Atlantis, within about half a mile of it, and watched over the next hour or so as they took it up to the pad and started securing it to the launch tower.

Orlando area: (Official Site, Wikipedia, Other Site of Interest)

It wouldn’t be hard to spend a whole month in the vicinity of Orlando and not do the same thing twice — except resting after several days of activity. There are a ton of major and minor amusement parks, the dinner-show has really taken off and there are about a dozen different ones here, and there are plenty of trinket shops too!

 

A few of the major theme parks:

Disney World-

             Magic Kingdom

             Epcot Center

             Animal Kingdom

             Hollywood Studios

             Typhoon Lagoon

             Blizzard Beach

Universal Studios-

             Universal Studios

             Islands of Adventure

             Wet ‘n’ Wild

Sea World

Busch Gardens

A few of the Dinner Shows (I haven’t been to them all yet, and they come and go)-

             Arabian Nights

             Pirate Dinner Adventure

             Medieval Times

             Wonder Works Magic

             Sleuths Mystery

             Al Capone’s

             Polynesian Luau

             Outta Control

My first experience with a Dinner Theater was in Spain, of all places. We pulled into Tarragona, which isn’t very far from Barcelona, and one of the tours was a trip to Madrid to go to a Medieval Nights show. Very interesting! There were people from all over the world there, not just us, and they were kind enough to do most of the show in English for us, since we made up the majority of the audience. Then we got to experience some Spanish dancing afterward, which is a show all in itself. Since then, I’ve been to a few others, but they don’t seem to have the after-show like they did in Madrid. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting experience!

Even if you don’t enjoy expensive theme parks, there’s still plenty of things to see and do in Orlando. There’s golf, there’s several sports teams, there’s a butt-ton of shopping, and there’s a Mongolian barbeque! There’s plenty of seafood and other good restaurants too. There’s also plenty of condos and hotels in the area.

I could go on and on about Florida, but I think I've told you quite enough to get your interest. I may in the future devote one of these articles to a particular place; the Everglades practically begs for it! So until next time, enjoy your summer!