Seeing Too Many Enemies of Science in a Faith-Full World

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Planet Earth is a world of the faith-full.  And, it seems Earth is likely to become yet more faith-full during the next few decades.  The scientific community will have to embrace that faith-full world if it wants a scientifically literate world.

The Pew results. Click image to enlarge.

The Pew results. Click image to enlarge.

A few years ago the Pew Research Center published an article entitled “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050” that projected the growth of various religious groups.  Their projections, among religions, were for Christians and Hindus to maintain their share of the world’s population, for Muslims to grow substantially, and for Buddhists and Folk Religions to shrink.  However, Pew projected the overall share of the world’s population that identifies with a religion to grow—from 83.6% of the world’s population in 2010, to 86.8% in 2050—as the religiously unaffiliated, which includes atheists and agnostics, drops from 16.4% of the population today to 13.2% in 2050.  Pew notes that while there is a belief among some that increasing economic development will result in increasing religious disaffiliation, that is the experience only within certain countries.  Pew writes—

There is little evidence of economic development leading to religious disaffiliation in Muslim-majority countries.  In Hindu-majority India, religious affiliation remains nearly universal despite rapid social and economic change.  And in China, religious affiliation—though very difficult to measure—may be rising along with economic development.

Pew notes that China is currently home to a large population of religiously unaffiliated, but if Christianity expands at the rate some experts predict, the world’s percentage of Christians may be higher than Pew projects—and the percentage of religiously unaffiliated, lower.

So if the scientific community wants a scientifically literate world, we will have to reach a faith-full world.  Unfortunately, the scientific community can seem a little lost on this point.  Consider, for example, the title of the 2016 book by Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Chicago:  Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible.  I thought of this again while paging though the Spring 2018 issue of the SPS Observer, the magazine of the Society of Physics Students, published by the American Institute of Physics.  Within that issue was a short opinion piece by Don Lincoln, Senior Scientist at Fermilab, entitled, “To the Ramparts: Defending Science!”, itself part of a larger section entitled “Exploring Science Communication and Policy”.  Lincoln writes—

There is a cultural war going on for the soul of America, and you are a soldier.  That might seem to be an overly martial metaphor, but bear with me.  On the one side, there are the voices of reason and science, guided by logic and with a deep respect for the interplay between mathematics, modeling, and empiricism.  On the other side are those who reject the tools that have advanced our understanding of the universe.  They are the antivaxxers and flat-earthers, the homeopaths and climate-change deniers....  There’s astrology, creation science, and zero-point energy....  The forces of pseudoscience have always been among us.  But the internet has given them a larger voice than before and allowed them to grow their communities.  With increased voice comes increased influence.

Click image to enlarge.

Click image to enlarge.

Lincoln is telling today’s young scientists to think of too many people as being enemies.  He puts too many people on the other side of the ramparts.  Flat-earth-ism, astrology, and creationism (to stick with astronomy-related things Lincoln mentions) are not all of a piece.*

Flat-earth stuff is simply naked ignorance, and it always has been.  No one ever in human history, who bothered to take the least trouble to look, ever thought that the Earth is flat.  Aristotle knew the Earth is round, and he was not the first to figure that out.  The roundness of Earth is obvious to anyone who pays any attention.

By contrast, plenty of distinguished thinkers over a vast span of centuries believed in astrology.  Johannes Kepler, one of my favorite people to talk about on this blog, did, and he is one of history’s A-list scientists.  Astrology has not withstood the test of time.  It fails as a science.  But, unlike flat-earth-ism, it was once sort of defended by reasonable people.

Creationism is different still.  One can reasonably argue that the universe was created by God relatively recently, and that God simply chose to create a mature universe that appears to science to have vast age, just as God chose to create Adam as a mature man who, were some scientist around to examine him, would have appeared much older than he was—and science cannot challenge this any more that it can challenge the claim that God created the universe this morning with the appearance of vast age.  Kepler believed that the universe was 6,000 years old.  Kepler was a voice of reason and science, guided by logic and with a deep respect for the interplay between mathematics, modeling, and empiricism, but his faith meant a lot to him.  Even were he made aware of modern scientific discoveries, he might have still affirmed as a matter of faith the idea of a recently created universe.

Faith means a lot to many, many people, and among people of faith there is a deep intellectual tradition of reason and logic and science.  And, according to Pew’s projections, faith-full people are only going to become a bigger part of the population of this planet.  Science absolutely, positively does not want to be putting them, or any noticeable fraction of them, on the other side of the ramparts with the Flat-Earth know-nothings.  Science cannot afford to be so exclusionary and opposed to diversity of thought as to accept declarations that science and religion are incompatible; it cannot afford to be in battle with any noticeable fraction of a group that makes up 80+% of the world’s population and growing.  On the contrary, the scientific community must work to ensure that there is no opposition between faith and science, that no one gets the message that science is more the business of people from Norway than people from Nigeria (Christianity, for example, often being cited as declining in Scandinavia and growing in Africa).  Call it Celebrating Diversity.  Call it wanting the largest possible pool of scientific talent.  Call it recognizing demographic reality.  Regardless of what we call it, we need to make sure that the only people on the other side of the ramparts are those who really do have no commerce with reason and logic.

And guess what?  The Vatican Observatory is doing exactly the sort of thing that the scientific community ought to be doing!  So, support science!  Support inclusivity!  Support more people thinking that they can be a part of the scientific enterprise!  Support the V.O., and particularly the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope!—click here.  Someone has to be doing science with an eye to an increasingly faith-full world.

 

*Lincoln does use the term “creation science”, so he may be referring to efforts to argue that the Earth does not even appear to be old as measured by science, efforts which tend more toward the flat-earth mentality, but without his having explicitly drawn this distinction I suspect most readers will think of creationism in general when they read his piece.

 

 

From the Tablet: Tales of Earthlings

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This entry is part 23 of 170 in the series Across the Universe

Along with my regular Tablet columns I am asked on occasion to write other articles for them. This one was run in August, 2005, just before the annual World Science Fiction Convention that was held that year in Glasgow. It ran again here at The Catholic Astronomer in 2015. This year, the Worldcon will be held August 16-20 in San Jose. I'll be there, too.

This is why I transferred to MIT... and became a scientist in the process.

The MIT Science Fiction Library is a big part of why I transferred to MIT... and became a scientist in the process.

When I was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) I belonged to the Science Fiction Society, the “MITSFS”. We had a motto: “We’re not Fans, we just read the stuff.” There was an element of self-parody, of course; if we weren’t fans, why would we pay our dues to belong to a club of “misfits”? (Because the club had a room full of books – some 30,000 SF novels and related material – and comfy chairs, a welcome hideaway on campus.)

But the motto also recognized an uncomfortable truth. Even at MIT, science fiction and its Fans had an unsavory reputation: pimply teenagers who sought escape from their miserable lives into a world of impossible make-believe. The truth was bad enough. We were, indeed, teenagers; and worse, engineering/science geeks-in-training. Who wanted to be lumped with people who talked through their noses and wore pocket protectors, if not Vulcan ears?

Among the 4,000 attendees at the annual World Science Fiction Convention, [held in 2005 in Glasgow from 4 - 8 August, 2005] I am confident that one can find a full quota of squeaky voices and Vulcan ears... every one of them well documented by journalists come to mock the geeks. Is that all they’ll see?

Indeed, I am attending this convention in part as a journalist. I’m working on a Radio 4 program about extraterrestrial life; after interviewing a number of scientists, we’re now talking to science fiction fans and authors. Some might say that, since no life outside Earth has yet been found, astrobiology is itself nothing but science fiction. My suspicion is that, since they’ve been thinking about aliens for eighty years, the science fiction community has turned this speculation into a science.

I am also serving on half a dozen panels, ranging from “What’s New in Astronomy” (lots!) to “The Dead God in Science Fiction and Fantasy” (they never seem to stay dead...)

This panel, on Science Denial, at Glasgow featured Science Denial - Petrea Mitchell, Paul McAuley, Johnathan Cowie, and me

This panel, on Science Denial, at Glasgow featured Petrea Mitchell, Paul McAuley, Johnathan Cowie, and me

Science programming is a popular part of most SF conventions. A special guest [in 2005 was] David Southwood, the European Space Agency Science Director. Fans are a ready-made audience eager to hear about the latest discoveries in biology or space exploration. It helps that so many of the attendees are, like my fellow MITSFS members, themselves scientists and engineers inspired to their vocations by the science fiction they read as teenagers. Among the friends I’m seeing again at this convention are Dermot Dobson, an engineer whose latest gizmos help doctors and researchers see inside patients at the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals; and Barry Gehm, whose work on oxidants at Northwestern University showed the health benefits of tea and red wine.

My Jesuit and Vatican hats get worn at this convention, too. For fans (and writers) curious about comparing their fantasies with The Real Thing, one panel has put me alongside representatives from the military, the government, and academia to describe what it is actually like “Living in Old Structures.” (This life does feel, at times, like living inside a fantasy novel. Indeed, my home in Castel Gandolfo at the Vatican Observatory has been marvelously misconstrued in The DaVinci Code.)

In fact the heart of science fiction is found in this overlap between intellectual knowledge and real life. SF takes the world we live in, deliberately changes one or two key truths, and then explores that “what if” by following rigorously the storyteller’s logic to see how a protagonist’s life is defined as a result. By seeing what might be, we come to appreciate what is.

Ultimately, SF is not about spaceships or bug-eyed monsters; it is about human beings. What does it mean to be human? How better to explore that question than to ask: human, as compared to what? Thus our stories are populated with aliens, clones, cyborgs, sentient computers. From the simplest space-opera, to the indescribable complexity of stories like Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus or Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (aka the movie Bladerunner), these stories explore how almost-humans interact with human protagonists, and define the essence of both.

Most importantly of all, they are stories. Just as the ancients taught with myths, and Jesus taught in parables, storytelling makes ideas accessible, memorable, and testable. Flaws in philosophy (or science) can be subtle and hard to spot; but no storyteller can get away for long with a plot and characters that don’t ring true to our own experience.

And so one even – or especially – finds truth and hope in dystopias. The notoriously anti-technology, anti-religious Philip Pullman fantasy series His Dark Materials depicts a universe where no one is good, and God is corrupt and dying: a sly, sneering Narnia for atheists. But Pullman’s quality as a storyteller overcomes his philosophical agenda. Its hollow, unhappy ending is indeed the inevitable outcome of his world-view; any Hollywood resolution would ring false.

Indeed, the best Catholic science fiction and fantasy writers (like Wolfe, or J. R. R. Tolkein) rarely express their Catholicism overtly. One of Wolfe’s main heros is a pagan priest; and Tolkein’s exhaustively constructed Hobbit universe has, curiously, no religion. But both authors build their works on the essential Catholic theme of redemption from sin. Likewise, Orson Scott Card has used the mythos of his Mormon religion subtly but to good effect in his constructed universes, and Christian themes can be seen not too far below the surface in many other prominent writers, from Cordwainer Smith (Paul Linebarger) to Connie Willis.

This is not to insist that all science fiction is profound, or that space opera is dead. “Ninety percent of all science fiction is crud,” noted the writer Theodore Sturgeon in the 1950s. “That’s because ninety percent of everything is crud.” And SF fans are the first to glory in the campy aspects of the field. The Star Trek parody Galaxy Quest was voted best science fiction film of the year in 2000, out-polling Star Wars I.

But even space opera today explores deeper issues than mere adventure. The rollicking tales of Lois McMaster Bujold are pure space opera; but they also involve serious what-if speculations on the social effects of possibilities ranging from corporate militarism to uterine replicators. Hers are musings, not diatribes; none of her opinions are so set in stone that she won’t illustrate an opposite point of view. And her stories are page-turners.

Indeed, for all its vaunted success in predicting technology, the most profound insights in science fiction may be its illustrating the social consequences of technology. Few descriptions of today’s multi-national corporations are as chilling, or accurate, as John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar – published in 1968. Contemporary issues of privacy, identity, and political revolution in a wired world were thoroughly explored in Poul Anderson’s Sam Hall – published in 1953. For a lesson on how not to confront terrorism, our politicians should read Eric Frank Russell’s short novel Wasp – published in 1957.

If science fiction fans have a reputation for brusk social manners, it may simply be born of their frustration with a world that’s decades behind them. At its best, science fiction leads to a deeper understanding of technology, society, and the fears and dreams of being human.

My biggest thrill at that convention was meeting Terry Pratchett, the best selling author of the Discworld series, who sadly died 2015. He showed up with a copy of one of my books, for me to autograph for him!

Skyward: August 2018

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This entry is part 10 of 10 in the series Guest Column

Mighty Mars and the Adirondacks

Adirondack Astronomy Retreat

Night sky at the Adirondack Astronomy Retreat July 29 2018. Credit: David Levy.

The summer of 2018 featured our fifteenth Adirondack Astronomy Retreat in the Adirondack mountains in upstate New York. It is also the last one that Wendee and I will host. Usually the dark and pristine sky from the AAR, as the retreat is known, provides brilliant walkways amongst the distant stars of the globular star cluster Messier 15, or the spiral arms of a galaxy all but lost in the vacuum of space and the mists of time.

But not this year. For the first time in fifteen years, Mars, relatively nearby, shone like a big red traffic light in the sky. All night long in the sky, during this particular summer, Mars ruled the night.

Mars and the Milky Way

Mars and the Milky Way in the south-southwestern sky at 2:00 AM Aug. 4 2018. Credit: Stellarium / Bob Trembley

The last time Mars looked this good, it was the late summer of 2003. I looked through Obadiah, my six-inch diameter refractor, and I decided that this was by far the best view I have ever had of Mars. Just before going inside, however, I used the very same eyepiece to catch a view of Mars using Pegasus, my eight-inch reflector telescope I have had since 1964.

The view through Pegasus was even better! The dark feature called Syrtis Major, and its large complex of adjacent features, were razor sharp. One of the polar caps was clearly visible. From that night onwards, I knew that old Pegasus is optically the very best telescope I have.

Canals on Mars

Illustration of Mars and its canals by Percival Lowell, representing the planet as seen by the Flagstaff observers. Credit: Wikimedia.

Mars and I go way back. When I was a teenager I loved to imagine intelligent life there. That idea permanently left me during the summer of 1965, when the famous New York Times headline “Mars at Noon: No Canals” reported on the visit to Mars by the spacecraft Mariner IV. The idea that Mars harbored no life at all held sway until 1971, when Mariner IX revealed a much more complex surface there including Vales Marineris, Mars’s larger-than-life version of the Grand Canyon. As years went by, and automated spacecraft actually landed there, Mars became ever more intriguing.

In 1995 an ancient meteorite from Mars, found in Antarctica, displayed vague signs of microfossils that could have given proof that once upon a time, Mars harbored life. Although that conclusion was somewhat premature, it did provide an explosion of interest in the question of Martian bacterial life. This summer a large underground lake was found beneath Mars’s south pole. Since Earth has life in virtually every marine environment, it is possible, maybe even likely, that Mars offers the same conditions. With each spacecraft, each new observation, we get closer to detecting life on Mars.

Mars Dust Storm

Side-by-side movies shows how dust has enveloped the Red Planet, courtesy of the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

In August, and I observed Mars through telescopes at our Adirondack Astronomy Retreat. Despite a planetwide dust storm rendering most surface details invisible, I did see both the north and south polar caps as well as some contrast features. We also had unfavorable weather this year at the retreat, with only about two clear hours during the week. But we did get to see Mars. As this lovely, brilliant red planet orbits the Sun, it offers us in the Adirondacks, and readers of these words in Arizona and around the Earth, an unparalleled view of an ancient and exquisite world.

Adirondack Astronomy Retreat

Scenery at the Adirondack Astronomy Retreat July 29 2018. Credit: David Levy.

In the Sky This Week – August 14, 2018

The Catholic Astronomer avatarPosted on by
This entry is part 56 of 56 in the series In the Sky This Week

The constellation Orion is now fully visible in the eastern predawn sky; I had someone at a Perseid meteor party ask me if Orion was what they were seeing in the east - I laughed and mentioned my post from last week where Orion had not quite fully risen before sunrise.

Orion

The constellation Orion in the early morning sky to the east on Aug. 14, 2018. Credit: Stellarium / Bob Trembley.

The southern sky will be simply fantastic for observing this week, with 3 three planets splashed across the sky.

Mars, Jupiter and Saturn

Mars, Saturn and Jupiter in the south-southern sky at 10:00 PM, Aug. 14 2018. Credit: Stellarium / Bob Trembley.

The Moon joins the planets in the south later this week; this weekend will be an outstanding time to do some sidewalk astronomy - which is exactly what my wife and I will be doing at the Michigan ComicCon this weekend at Detroit's Cobo Center!

Moon, Jupiter and Saturn

The Moon will be between Jupiter and Saturn in the southern sky after sunset between Aug. 17-20, 2018. The yellow dots show the position of the Moon on the 17th, 19th, 20th, and 21st. Credit: Stellarium / Bob Trembley.

The Moon joins Venus and Jupiter in the western sky at dusk on Aug. 14th.

Jupiter, Moon and Venus in southwestern sky

The Moon joins Venus and Jupiter in the southwestern sky at dusk, Aug. 14, 2018. Credit: Stellarium / Bob Trembley.

Southern Hemisphere:

From Antonina, Brazil, Venus and the crescent Moon are high in the western sky after sunset on Aug. 14th.

Moon Jupiter Antonina, Brazil

Seen from Antonina, Brazil, the Moon joins Venus and Jupiter in the western sky at dusk, Aug. 14, 2018. Credit: Stellarium / Bob Trembley.

The Moon

The Moon is a waxing crescent visible in the southwestern sky at dusk. The Moon will be at first-quarter on August 18th, and will then be a waxing gibbous, visible in the southern sky around dusk later in the week. The Moon with be an excellent target for sidewalk astronomy this week.

Moon

The Moon from Aug. 14-21, 2018. Visualizations by Ernie Wright

Observing Target: Theophilus, Cyrillus and Catharina Craters

Moon

Theophilus crater location on the Moon. Visualizations by Ernie Wright , edited by Bob Trembley.

Theophilus is a prominent lunar impact crater that lies between Sinus Asperitatis in the north and Mare Nectaris to the southeast. It partially intrudes into the comparably sized crater Cyrillus to the southwest. To the east is the smaller crater Mädler and further to the south-southeast is Beaumont. It was named after the 4th-century Coptic Pope Theophilus of Alexandria.

Theophilus, Cyrillus and Catharina form a prominent group of large craters visible on the terminator 5 days after the new moon.
From: Wikipedia

Viewing these three craters will give you an excellent start towards getting your Astronomical League Lunar Observing Program Pin!

The Sun

The Sun as been spot-free for 11 days - a large active region with coronal loop activity will soon be rotating out of view, while a smaller very active region rotates into view. The northern coronal hole has a long tendril stretching down past the equator.

The solar wind speed is 329.6 km/sec, with a density of 5.9 protons/cm3.

SpaceWeather.com says: "A long, narrow hole has opened in the sun's atmosphere, and it is spewing high-speed solar wind into space. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory photographed the fissure on Aug. 13th pointing directly at Earth:"

Small prominences continue to appear all over the Sun for last couple days, with one rather large one appearing briefly popping out of the limb to the right of the video below.

You can view the Sun in near real-time, in multiple frequencies here: SDO-The Sun Now.
You can create your own time-lapse movies of the Sun here: AIA/HMI Browse Data.
You can browse all the SDO images of the Sun from 2010 to the present here: Browse SDO archive.

Asteroids

Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters:

Asteroid
Date(UT)
Miss Distance
Velocity (km/s)
Diameter (m)
2018 PM10
2018-Aug-10
3.2 LD
7.8
14
2018 PD20
2018-Aug-10
0.1 LD
12
12
2018 PL10
2018-Aug-18
19.4 LD
12.6
135
2018 PK9
2018-Aug-22
17 LD
9
31
2018 PW7
2018-Aug-23
11.3 LD
10.6
44
2018 PR9
2018-Aug-24
18.1 LD
14
46
2018 LQ2
2018-Aug-27
9.4 LD
1.5
39
2016 GK135
2018-Aug-28
16.8 LD
2.8
9
2016 NF23
2018-Aug-29
13.3 LD
9
93
1998 SD9
2018-Aug-29
4.2 LD
10.7
51
2018 DE1
2018-Aug-30
15.2 LD
6.5
28
2001 RQ17
2018-Sep-02
19.3 LD
8.3
107
2015 FP118
2018-Sep-03
12.3 LD
9.8
490
2017 SL16
2018-Sep-20
8.5 LD
6.4
25
2018 EB
2018-Oct-07
15.5 LD
15.1
155

Notes: LD means "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. Table from SpaceWeather.com

Near-Earth objects (NEOs) discovered this month: 50, this year: 1022, all time: 18574.
Potentially hazardous asteroids: 1912 (as of July 31, 2018)
Minor Planets discovered: 779,736 (as of July 31, 2018)

Fireballs

On Aug. 13, 2018, the NASA All Sky Fireball Network reported 214 fireballs - WOW!

Fireball Orbits

In this diagram of the inner solar system, all of the fireball orbits intersect at a single point--Earth. Source: Spaceweather.com

The Solar System

This is the position of the planets and a couple spacecraft in the solar system:

Inner Solar System Aug. 14 2018

Position of the planets in the inner system, Aug 14 2018. Credit: NASA Eyes on the Solar System / Bob Trembley.

Middle Solar System

Position of the planets in the middle system, Aug 14 2018. Credit: NASA Eyes on the Solar System / Bob Trembley.

Outer Solar System

Position of the planets in the outer solar system, Aug 14 2018. Credit: NASA Eyes on the Solar System / Bob Trembley.

Exoplanets

Confirmed Exoplanets: 3,775 (8/9/2018)
Multi-Planet Systems: 625 (8/9/2018)
Kepler Candidate Exoplanets: 4,496 (8/31/2017)
TESS Candidate Exoplanets: 0
Data from the NASA Exoplanet Archive

Apps used for this post:

Stellarium: a free open source planetarium app for PC/MAC/Linux. It's a great tool for planning observing sessions.
NASA Eyes on the Solar System: an immersive 3D solar system and space mission simulator - free for the PC /MAC.
I maintain the unofficial NASA Eyes Facebook page.

NASA 60th Anniversary

2018 is NASA's 60th anniversary!

P.S. My cat Deimos was trying his hardest to make it difficult for me to write this post...

The Photoheliograph pt. 2

The Catholic Astronomer avatarPosted on by

The eclipse of 1860

In 1858, Warren De la Rue was visiting Russia on a business trip and was introduced to the idea of photographing the 1860 Solar eclipse that was to occur in Spain by Dr. Medler. He also was shown a Daguerreotype of the 1851 eclipse taken by Dr. Busch with the Konigsberg Heliometer.

Rights: Friedrich-Schiller-Universität: Historische Sammlungen zur Naturwissenschaft

Daguerreotype of the Total Eclipse  28. July 1851.

At first, he was unimpressed with the detail of the Daguerreotype (that is to say the lack of detail of the “protuberances”, not the image itself) and was a little concerned with the practicality of photographing such an event. He was quick to observe that the state of the photographic art and that of celestial photography itself had advanced considerably in the intervening 7 years.

He had determined to make the trip himself, but was limited in instruments to photograph with. He had in his own collection several telescopes with which to photograph, however they were limited in image size, the largest of which would still be too small to overcome any defects in the collodion process. His attention was thus drawn to the Kew Photoheliograph that he had overseen the construction of. At the time it was reliably taking 4” diameter images of the sun regularly. This size was ideal for studying the prominences and large enough to be able to discern the difference between a collodion artifact and a solar one.

Mr. Airy of the Kew Committee offered his services in organizing travel. The Astronomer Royal procured a steamship from the Admiralty, and a sum of 150 pounds was served for preparing for the trip. De La Rue and 4 other men were to travel to Spain in June of 1860. Preparing the necessary articles took a year. This included not only preparation of the Photoheliograph and a new pedestal, but all the chemistry and a portable observatory.

By Smyth - Illustrated London News, Feb 4, 1860, Public Domain

HMS Himalaya, Steamer that took the expedition to Spain.

The observatory, at first was to be a simple tent, mostly to act as a darkroom for developing the plates. When it was learned that a steamship was available, this turned into a collapsible wood structure, divided into two rooms. The first had a retractable roof to allow for observations, the second was a darkroom complete with a cistern and sink. The entirety was covered by a heavy canvas awning that was pulled back for observation. The half covering the darkroom was kept wet, and succeeded in keeping the darkroom several degrees cooler than the warm Spanish summer air.

In addition to the Kew instrument, several other pieces of equipment were included. A transit, barometers, sextant, and 3 chronometers were added. A double set of chemistry for photography was made up, as well as reserves to make more in case of emergency. Dry rations were included as well, in case the gentlemen were required to camp. All told almost 2 tons of equipment was packed up.

The journey was not kind to several of the more delicate instruments, especially the chronometers. These were needed for both timing the eclipse, but also finding the exact latitude of the observation site. De La Rue finally double checked the location data by spotting known stars and timing their ascent and measuring the angles needed to locate them. Another hitch was the location that was chosen. A thrashing floor used for preparing grain after harvesting was to be used, however the farmer needed it the day of the eclipse. Once the party explained their purpose in being there, the farmer offered to travel “some distance” to the next floor. He did this without any remuneration for his inconvenience. Several times during the lecture, De La Rue mentions the great lengths the locals, the constabulary, and his own troupe went to to ensure success. Often to some hardship of their own, and always without taking any gifts of gratitude.
Barring a small fire caused by an overenthusiastic assistant, the recording of the eclipse was an uneventful, and total success. Two photographs of the totality were taken, along with several drawings. These provided the necessary proof that the prominence were indeed a solar atmosphere, as suspected.

The members of the Eclipse Expedition

There were a total of 31 in the party, that split into 2 groups. Airy and his party, including his wife, son, and eldest daughter were one. . The De la Rue party found terrific luck. The whole enterprise was seen as a total success, and the group began referring to themselves as "the Himalaya Expedition". While on the way home, it was decided that everyone involved should be officially thanked, from the ship's crew, to the constabulary and residents of the small town they imposed on, such was the joy they felt in their successes.

It wasn't until 1862 that the official data was released,  due to the need for an accurate instrument for measuring the photographs. The device used for measurements was a sliding and rotating stage, each divided into degrees with a magnifying lens for looking at the image. The idea was to reference the crosshairs on the image to give definite 90 degree angles, and measure in minutes of arc, the location of spots, and coronal features. This way, height and width of the prominence could be figured.

Thus ended the first solar eclipse expedition. Subsequent trips to various parts of the Empire were undertaken with Heliographs, and the latest device: the solar spectrometer. Both professional and amateurs alike traveled to view the Sun’s corona.

Summer Vacation Bible School Meets Astronomy!

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One of the keys to success as the new pastor of a parish is to get to know your people... rapidly! I had a fun opportunity last week to not only get to know some of the youth at my new assignment, but also let them get to know their Pastor. As is the case at many parishes over the summer, St. Olaf held its annual Summer Vacation Bible School. Given the popularity of the recent Star Wars movies (I completely agree with Chris Graney's critique of the movies), our youth leaders chose a program called "Scar Force." The term obviously references Jesus' wounds, Scar, and the Holy Spirit, Force. The students were trained to be "J-Di" (Jesus' Disciples).

Given my love of astronomy, the organizers of our Summer Bible School asked me to do something with my telescopes. I was ready to take my H-Alpha telescope out to look at the Sun. Then, in predictable Wisconsin star gazing conditions, haze... a lot of haze! Frustrating, yes, but having dealt with these situations before, I had a "Plan B" in the event of uncooperative weather. What was my Plan B, you may ask? I set up my computer projector and introduced our youth to the NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) to show them how they could study the Sun on their own!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images of the Sun and Solar Winds taken yesterday afternoon.

The students and I had a wonderful morning talking about solar prominences, solar winds, northern lights, and a little bit about the Parker Solar Probe that launched this past weekend. Throw in a little discussion about the size of the Sun in relation to the size of the Earth, and the astronomy portion of Scar Force received a great deal of "ohs and ahs."

After the science lesson and chat about NASA's mission to the Sun, I then asked the kids, "How do we understand stars in the Bible?" One of the youth immediately raised his hand and said, "The eleven stars that bowed down to Joseph in his dream!" A day earlier, our future J-Di studied the story of Joseph's prophetic dreams and their meaning in the book of Genesis.

Then Joseph had another dream, and told it to his brothers. “Look, I had another dream,” he said; “this time, the sun and the moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me.” When he told it to his father and his brothers, his father reproved him and asked, “What is the meaning of this dream of yours? Can it be that I and your mother and your brothers are to come and bow to the ground before you?” So his brothers were furious at him but his father kept the matter in mind. (Genesis 37:9-11)

We talked about how the most common interpretation of stars in the Bible are as symbols of people. In Joseph's dream, the Sun and Moon symbolized his mother and father and the eleven stars symbolized his eleven brothers. I then transitioned to the story of God changing Abram's name to Abraham and how the Covenant made with God was emphasized by referencing the stars as a symbol of his future family tree.

He took him outside and said: Look up at the sky and count the stars, if you can. Just so, he added, will your descendants be. (Genesis 15:5)

I shared with our youth, "The next time you go outside at night and look at the stars, remember that God has used them as a sacred reminder of you and me - The continued fruitfulness of God's promise to Abraham." Talking to a few of our adult volunteers the next day, I think it's safe to say I have some budding astronomers among the kids of St. Olaf!

Messier 13 - The Great Cluster in Hercules. Image acquisition by Jim Misti, image processing by Robert Gendler.

Spiritual Exercise: When you look up at the night sky, what do you see? Do you see massive nuclear furnaces? Do you see the Suns of other worlds? Do you see the age these celestial giants reveal in tints of blues and reds? Do you see yourself, symbolized in this constant image of silent tranquility? Do you see something that makes you feel insignificant because of the radical smallness of our material self? Do you find your significance, realizing that if God sees the beauty of the night sky as symbolic of you and me, then we must be greatly loved and of great significance in God's eyes? Pray with these questions and may all of us go "back to school" as we seek to not only understand the science of the stars, but find in their beauty new and creative ways of affirming our dignity amid the radiant light of our celestial neighbors.

Happy Monday!

The Scale of the Universe (re-run)

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This is a re-run of a post that I originally wrote Nov 11, 2015.
I think it goes well with the recent posts on the expanding universe. I added some additional closing thoughts.

Arguably, one of the most important concepts one learns from studying astronomy, is the astounding vastness of the cosmos. This vastness extends not only out to the very VERY large and far away - it extends down to the very VERY small.

The human mind is ill-equipped to grasp the scale of the universe - but we can sure give it a try! Over the last few decades, several videos have been made showing the scale of the Universe.

1977: The iconic Powers of Ten video - remember: this was made before computer graphics:

1980: Cosmos: "The Edge of Forever" - Carl Sagan discusses the origins and structure of the Universe, and gives us the quote: "We are made of star stuff; we are a way for the Cosmos to know itself." Here is the intro to the episode:

1996: IMAX movie Cosmic Voyage - narrated by Morgan Freeman. An updated version of Powers of Ten, with some nice computer graphics.

1997: The opening scene from the movie Contact - A personal favorite of mine:

2012: The Scale of the Universe 2 Video:

2012: The Scale of the Universe 2 Interactive: http://htwins.net/scale2/ (Warning! This thing is WAY too much fun, and you can lose a lot more time playing with this than you might realize...)

2015: Business Insider's Scale of the Universe - VERY NICELY DONE! Uses imagery from "The Scale of the Universe 2"

This series of images starts at the Earth, and zooms out to the edge of the observable universe. Image credit: Andrew Z. Colvin

This series of images starts at the Earth, and zooms out to the edge of the observable universe. Image credit: Andrew Z. Colvin

 

Other videos/sites of interest:

2000: National Geographic's Universe Map.  Years ago, I had this poster - from the magazine, on my wall; I've seen this poster on many walls over the years...

Universe

National Geographic Universe Poster. Credit: National Geographic Magazine

2011: Millennium Simulation Project: Modeling the universe at very large scales.

Millennium Simulation Project Homepage: http://wwwmpa.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galform/virgo/millennium/

2014: Google's 100,000 Stars: http://stars.chromeexperiments.com/ - An interactive 3D visualization of the stellar neighborhood, including over 100,000 nearby stars.

2014: Riding Light - animation illustrating the real-time journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system.

2014: Across the Universe: Hubble Ultra Deep Field 3D Visualization

Planet and Star Size Comparison:

The Cosmic Web
The image below is a visualization of the 'cosmic web' - the universe at large scales. Each bright knot is an entire galaxy, while the purple filaments show where material exists between the galaxies. To the human eye, only the galaxies would be visible, and this visualization allows us to see the strands of material connecting the galaxies and forming the cosmic web.

This visualization is based on a scientific simulation of the growth of structure in the universe. The matter, dark matter, and dark energy in a region of the universe are followed from very early times of the universe through to the present day using the equations of gravity, hydrodynamics, and cosmology. The normal matter has been clipped to show only the densest regions, which are the galaxies, and is shown in white. The dark matter is shown in purple. The size of the simulation is a cube with a side length of 134 megaparsecs (437 million light-years).

A visualization of the 'cosmic web', the large scale structure of the universe. Credit: NASA/NCSA University of Illinois Visualization by Frank Summers, Space Telescope Science Institute, Simulation by Martin White and Lars Hernquist, Harvard University

 

"This Makes me Feel So Small"
I'd heard this so many times when discussing the size of the Universe - but I have to ask "How big do you want to be?" Jokingly I add "Objects above a couple hundred kilometers in size become spherical under their own gravity, and start to differentiate... that seems like it would be pretty uncomfortable..."

But it really depends on your point of view: to a microbe in your gut, your body would be as vast as a galaxy is to us humans; at the scale of an atom, a microbe would be unimaginably huge. I like to think that beings on Earth are just the right size.

Sentient Beings are How the Universe Sees and Experiences Itself.

This quote is a mash-up from quotes by Alan W. Watts and Carl Sagan - I thought this a less human-centric version, that would include (at a minimum): whales, dolphins, elephants, and apes (maybe ants and bees). It also includes extraterrestrial intelligences.

So get away from city lights, and look up at the night sky. Let the beauty and majesty of the Universe fill you with awe and wonder -  and try to give the Universe a good accounting of itself!

What do the Kentucky Ark and Soviet Scientists have in common? Opposition to the Big Bang Theory! (re-run)

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This is a re-run of a post that I originally wrote for October 5, 2016.
I think it goes well with the posts on the expanding universe from two weeks ago and last week.

What Google returns when searching on the Kentucky Ark.

What Google returns when searching on the Kentucky Ark.

Last week [in 2016], in a post about discussing theories like the Big Bang theory with those who hold traditional views of the age of the universe (such as the folks who built the Kentucky Ark), I mentioned how Arthur Eddington and Edwin Hubble expressed opposition to the idea of a finite age to the universe, and how the name “Big Bang” was a derisive joke-name given to it by Fred Hoyle.

Guess who else disliked the Big Bang Theory?  Soviet scientists.  Yes, in 1949 Soviet astronomers pledged to fight against the theory of the “widening of the Universe” and declared that, in order to counterbalance this pro-religious “bourgeois” idea

...Soviet science must intensify its work on regions beyond our galaxy, to give a materialistic explanation of the red displacement in the spectra of galaxies.*

And, during the same time period, members of the Soviet establishment made statements such as

Today’s bourgeois science supplies the church and fideism with new arguments… [which] assert that the world is finite, that it is limited in time and space....  The theory [“broadly known in capitalist countries as the expanding Universe theory”] was offered in the late 1920s by the Belgian priest Georges Lemaitre, and it is underlain by the phenomenon called in astronomy the “red shift.”  The reactionary scientists Lemaitre... and others made use of the “red shift” in order to strengthen religious views on the structure of the Universe....  Falsifiers of science want to revive the fairy tale of the origin of the world from nothing.**

Lemaitre1

Georges Lemaitre

And then there was

The general scientific crisis in America and Western Europe is reflected in astronomy also.  As a result, cosmogony, the branch of astronomy concerned with questions of the development of celestial bodies, has been turned into a repository for all kinds of idealistic nonsense and absurd fabrications which in the last analysis aim at restoring the legend of the world’s creation.+

Yes, the Big Bang Theory has had its detractors.  These folks saw it as a creationist theory (because the universe has a beginning in the Big Bang Theory, albeit 13.7 billion years ago) developed by a Catholic priest (Lemaitre).  The prevailing view had been that the universe had no beginning and was broadly unchanging.

One of the great ironies of the Big Bang theory is that opposition to it has come from such widely divergent groups as “godless Soviet” scientists and the folks who brought us the Kentucky Ark.++

*From “Russian Astronomers Hold Theory of Cosmos Origin Surpasses West” by Harrison E. Salisbury, The New York Times (July 14, 1949), page 1.

**From Alexander A. Friedmann: The Man Who Made the Universe Expand, by E. A. Tropp, V. Y. Frenkel, and A. D. Chernin, translated by A. Dron and M. Burov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 223-224.

+From “Greetings to Winners of Stalin Prizes,” Pravda (March 5, 1951), pg. 4.  The quote is from V. Ambartsumyan, who was a Stalin Prize winner and President of the Armenian Academy of Sciences.

++I learned about Soviet opposition to the Big Bang theory from the talk “The Relations between Dutch Radio Astronomers and Their Soviet Colleagues during the Heyday of the Cold War,” by Astrid Elbers of Leiden Observatory, at the Tenth Biennial History of Astronomy Workshop, July 6-10, 2011, at the University of Notre Dame.  Elbers’s work was published in 2012 under the title “De relaties tussen Nederlandse astronomen en hun Sovjetcollega’s tijdens de Koude Oorlog.” The published version contains other interesting quotations related to this topic.

 

Across the Universe: All of the Above

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This entry is part 22 of 170 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in August, 2005. It first ran at The Catholic Astronomer in August, 2015

[During a weekend in August, 2005] while over a million young people were gathered in Germany to celebrate World Youth Day with the Pope, a hundred and thirty kids from Detroit were taking part in a parallel camp-out organized by the Archdiocese on the grounds of a small farm in the Thumb of Michigan.

Croswell, Michigan... in the Thumb, where I grew up and pondered a life of astronomy or a life of journalism

Croswell, Michigan... in the Thumb, where I grew up and pondered a life of astronomy or a life of journalism

(The lower peninsula of my home state, Michigan, is shaped like a mitten, and I grew up on the peninsula jutting into Lake Huron that makes up the mitten’s thumb. Readers of a certain age may remember a British pop band who found a town at the Thumb’s base by sticking a pin into a map and thereby called themselves the Bay City Rollers.)

“Turn left onto a dirt road, and look for a pond and a red barn,” read my directions. Every barn in Michigan is red, and nearly every farm has a pond. But I really didn’t need the directions. I had lived and worked in this area thirty five years ago, during my summer breaks from MIT, while trying to choose between a career in journalism or one in science.

I came this evening expecting to give a little talk about the Star of Bethlehem and maybe point out a few constellations once the sun had set. When I arrived, I learned from the label on my name-tag that I was to be the Keynote Speaker. “You’ll be talking at nine o’clock,” I was told. That gave me 90 minutes to gather my thoughts.

The local astronomy clubs had come out in force, too, setting up a number of beautiful small telescopes designed to entice me, and distract my attention from the looming talk. While the teens were out in the woods, hearing talks about God and Nature, I chatted with the local organizers and admired the telescopes.

I had forgotten, in the intervening 35 years, how beautiful this part of the world looked. The low rolling hills, the swaying willow trees and pine woods, and the fading sunset on puffy cumulus filling the sky this warm, humid summer evening, brought me back to my youth.

What would today’s kids be wanting to hear from me?

As darkness fell, the last stragglers gathered in the light of a bonfire as I climbed onto a farm-trailer-turned-stage. I spoke a little about the Vatican Observatory, and our work studying a universe named Good by its Creator, made sacred by His Incarnation. I spoke about the Star of Bethlehem, and astrology, and how God finds us even in our foolishness. I spoke about how astronomy and religion both pull us out of our daily lives but stay present with us no matter where we find ourselves.

The kids, in their turn, had their questions: How big is the universe? Why didn’t the Jewish scholars notice the Star of Bethlehem? Where was the best place I ever saw the stars? Is that new-found object, bigger than Pluto, a new planet?

Simple, profound, and mostly unanswerable, they were the questions of minds full of life, of possibilities, of uncertainties. They were working out for themselves the same questions I had faced in this place: do I become an astronomer, or a writer? A religious, or a layperson? Head in the clouds (alas, growing thicker as the evening went on) or feet on the ground?

A scientific experiment or theory that’s never written up and published is worse than the tree in the forest that no one hears fall. We scientists must share what we do with our peers. More, we must share it with the folks back home who supported us when we were growing up nerdly, and who now pay the taxes that pay our bills. Scientist, journalist, Jesuit, layman? It is never either/or. It is all of the above.

Ghost of elements, spectres of the universe: Angelo Secchi SJ

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This plate is from Fr. Angelo Secchi SJ's catalog ca 1870.

If you’ve seen the flash of yellow-orange flames when a pot boils over on a gas stove, you’ve gotten a glimpse of the ghost of an atom, specifically sodium.  The color is part of the atom’s spectrum, which shows which types or frequencies of light are absorbed by that particular atom.

In the late 17th century, Isaac Newton used the Latin word for ghost, spectrum, to describe the bands of colors he saw when light shone through a prism. In 1814 Joseph von Fraunhofer noticed he could see bright lines instead of the bands of colors when looking at certain flames through a prism.  He went on to develop an instrument to measure these spectral lines, called a spectroscope.

Fraunhofer noticed a series of missing colors, dark lines, when looking at the sun’s light through the spectroscope, and went on to characterize the light from several stars as well.  Fifty years later Jesuit polymath Angelo Secchi invented a series of spectroscopic instruments specifically for examining the patterns of colors in the light from stars and the sun and used them to build a catalog of more than 4000 stars.  Secchi classified the stars by recurring patterns in the light, which were a clue to the star’s composition.

Around the same time Secchi was building his catalog of stellar spectra, Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen (the inventor of the ubiquitous Bunsen burner) were involved in a more down-to-earth scheme. Kirchhoff and Bunsen teamed up to create a spectroscope that used Bunsen’s new hotter, gas burner to ignite samples.  They noted that that when they combusted a pure element it produced a characteristic set of lines, a spectral fingerprint, that could be used to identify it.

In October of 1860, Kirchhoff and Bunsen announced they had used their spectroscope to discover a new chemical element, which they named cesium, for the blue color of its principal line.  Chemists quickly began to use Bunsen’s spectroscope to find new elements.  A few months later Kirchhoff and Bunsen found two bright ruby red lines in an extract of a silicate mineral lepidolite, the spectral traces of another new element, rubidium.

Thallium’s ghostly green emanations were first observed by William Crookes, indium, ironically named for its violet lines by its color blind discoverer Ferdinand Reich.  Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran spectroscopically painstakingly identified element 66 in a sample extracted from his marble hearth, and instead of naming it for the colors of the lines, called it dysprosium, from the Greek for “hard to get” — because it was.

Hunting for new elements spectroscopically meant you didn’t actually need to have any of it in your lab or even on your planet, as long as you could observe the light from a burning sample.  In 1868 several chemists and astronomers independently observed a faint line in the spectrum of the sun, and assigned it to a new element, helium, which as far as they knew did not exist on earth.  It would take nearly 30 years for two Swedish chemists to confirm that it was present on earth — by matching the spectrum with that of a gas found in a uranium ore.  (All the helium found on earth comes from radioactive decay.)

These ghostly lines produced by elements helped fuel yet another critical discovery that would have far reaching consequences for chemists’ understanding of the periodic table:  quantum mechanics.  Niels Bohr’s quantum mechanical model of the atom opened the door to explaining the line spectra of chemical elements. Though more accurate and sophisticated quantum mechanical models of the atom now exist, Bohr’s model showed the relationship between the lines and an atom’s electron by insisting that the electrons’ energies were quantized, that is, they could only have certain energies.

So why do atoms have ghosts?  When an atom is heated to high temperatures, as in a flame or a star, the energy it absorbs excites its electrons.  You can think of the electrons in an atom as being on an energy ladder. (this isn’t quite correct as far as the quantum mechanics goes, but it is a reasonable approximation and easier to visualize.)  They can only have energies that match the rungs of the ladder, and each type of atom has a unique arrangement of the rungs.

Emission spectrum of iron.

When an atom absorbs energy, its electrons move to higher rungs.  Excited electrons are unstable. They quickly return to their original arrangement, giving off some their excess energy in the form of light as they fall back to their original rung.  The color (the wavelength) of the light emitted depends on the difference in energy between the rungs.  The colors of light emitted are the ghosts of the energy rungs.  Since each element has a unique pattern of rungs, it will have a unique spectrum of emitted light and so revealing their presence to the sharp eyes of spectroscopists.

The spectra that Secchi so carefully observed (and hand drew!) were not just a way to identify a particular star, but clues to its chemical composition and even more critically to its evolution. Chemists and astrophysicists still use the light emitted and absorbed by atoms and molecules to identify their presence.  We hunt for the structure of the universe in its ghosts.

If you want a way to see the ghosts of atoms for yourself, try this inexpensive DIY folding spectroscope you can attach to your phone. Use it to check out the light from a neon sign or from a street light!

For a wonderful description of the elements, including stories of how they were first discovered, read John Emsley’s Nature’s Building Blocks.

Want to read more about Angelo Secchi, SJ? Try Adam Hincks SJ's piece in American Magazine or my colleague at the Specola Bob Macke SJ's piece about Secchi's more terrestrial scientific pursuits.

This post is a version of an essay written for a collection commissioned for the UN’s International Year of Light in 2015, and is cross posted at Quantum Theology.  

 

In the Sky This Week – August 7, 2018

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This entry is part 55 of 56 in the series In the Sky This Week

Fall stars have appeared in the eastern predawn skies; the constellation Orion is low in the east, a thin waning crescent Moon near it for the next few days. Over the coming weeks, Orion will appear a bit higher each morning as it moves slowly towards the southeast.

Eastern predawn sky Aug. 7, 2018

The waning crescent Moon and the constellation Orion are in the early morning sky to the east on August 7, 2018. The Moon also be visible in the early morning sky all week. Credit: Stellarium / Bob Trembley.

Mars and Saturn continue to be a great observing targets in the southern skies for weeks to come!

Southern sky Aug. 7 2018

Mars and Saturn in the early morning sky to the south on Aug. 7, 2018. Credit: Stellarium / Bob Trembley.

Jupiter crawls slowly westward as the Earth continues to pull away from the giant planet; Jupiter will continue to dim over the next several weeks, and will set earlier each evening.

Planets in the southern sky

Jupiter and Saturn in the southern sky at 10:00 PM, Aug. 7 2018. Credit: Stellarium / Bob Trembley.

Venus is catching up with the Earth, and appears lower each evening in the western sky at dusk. The current half-phase of Venus is quite obvious in telescopes.

Southwestern sky at dusk, Aug. 7, 2018

Venus and Jupiter are in the southwestern sky at dusk, Aug. 7, 2018. Credit: Stellarium / Bob Trembley.

Southern Hemisphere:

From Buenos Aires, Argentina, the waning crescent Moon and Orion appear in the east-northeastern sky predawn sky. The Moon and Orion appear flipped from how I see them in Michigan - the Moon appearing as it does to me in a waxing crescent phase at dusk in the west.

Eastern predawn sky from Buenos Aires

The Moon and Orion in the eastern predawn sky as seen from Buenos Aires, Aug 7 2018/ Credit: Stellarium / Bob Trembley.

On overhead view from Buenos Aires after dusk is simply a spectacular splash of planets across a sky bisected by the disk of the galaxy. Seeing the sky from the southern hemisphere is high on my "bucket list."

You guys get all the cool skies

The southwestern and overhead sky after dusk as seen from Buenos Aires, Aug 7 2018/ Credit: Stellarium / Bob Trembley.

The Moon

The Moon is a waning crescent visible in the eastern predawn sky. The Moon will be new on August 11th, and will return as a waxing crescent, visible in the western sky at dusk later in the week.

Moon

The Moon from Aug. 7-14, 2018. Visualizations by Ernie Wright

Observing Target: Jupiter

Jupiter

Jupiter in an 8 inch Dobsonian telescope. Credit: Bob Trembley, Jan. 10, 2010

Jupiter won't be around much longer, so catch a glimpse of it now while you can! I've shown Jupiter to many people in recent weeks - it's always a treat!

At a recent meeting of the Warren Astronomical Society, a member mentioned seeing a dark storm in the northern latitudes.

The Hubble Space Telescope has imaged Jupiter and its moons many times over the couple decades

Jupiter

Constituent Image for Jupiter/Ganymede Compass and Scale Image. Credit: NASA, ESA, and E. Karkoschka (University of Arizona)

Jupiter

This dazzling Hubble Space Telescope photo of Jupiter was taken when it was comparatively close to Earth, at a distance of 415 million miles. Hubble reveals the intricate, detailed beauty of Jupiter's clouds as arranged into bands of different latitudes, known as tropical regions. These bands are produced by air flowing in different directions at various latitudes. Lighter colored areas, called zones, are high-pressure where the atmosphere rises. Darker low-pressure regions where air falls are called belts. The planet's trademark, the Great Red Spot, is a long-lived storm roughly the diameter of Earth. Much smaller storms appear as white or brown-colored ovals. Such storms can last as little as a few hours or stretch on for centuries. Credits: NASA, ESA, and A. Simon (NASA Goddard)

NASA's Juno mission is in orbit of Jupiter; citizen scientists have been processing raw data returned from Juno and producing some truly spectacular images:

The Perseid Meteor Shower

"The Best Meteor Shower of the Year"™ happens this week. The Perseid meteor shower happens on August 12th. Observatories, museums and venues around the planet will be hosting star parties. Here's hoping you catch a nice fireball!

Perseids Radiant

The Perseid meteor showers appear to radiate from the constellation Perseus. Perseus is visible in the northern sky soon after sunset this time of year. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The Sun

The Sun as been spot-free for 4 days - two active regions with coronal loop activity are facing Earth. The huge coronal hole at the north pole from last week remains, and a couple small equatorial holes are near the center of the Sun's disk

The solar wind speed is 362.4 km/sec, with a density of 26.2 protons/cm3  that's the thickest I've seen the wind!

SpaceWeather.com says: "The sun has been without sunspots for 38 of the past 41 days. To find a similar stretch of blank suns, you have to go back to 2009 when the sun was experiencing the deepest solar minimum in a century. Solar minimum has returned, bringing extra cosmic rays, long-lasting holes in the sun's atmosphere, and strangely pink auroras."

There appear to be small prominences all over the Sun the last couple days; one active region will soon be rotating out of view as another, larger one rotates into view.

You can view the Sun in near real-time, in multiple frequencies here: SDO-The Sun Now.
You can create your own time-lapse movies of the Sun here: AIA/HMI Browse Data.
You can browse all the SDO images of the Sun from 2010 to the present here: Browse SDO archive.

Asteroids

Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters:

Asteroid
Date(UT)
Miss Distance
Velocity (km/s)
Diameter (m)
2018 OZ
2018-Aug-06
7 LD
9.7
37
2018 PC
2018-Aug-06
12.1 LD
9.3
54
2018 LQ2
2018-Aug-27
9.4 LD
1.5
39
2016 GK135
2018-Aug-28
16.8 LD
2.8
9
2016 NF23
2018-Aug-29
13.3 LD
9
93
1998 SD9
2018-Aug-29
4.2 LD
10.7
51
2018 DE1
2018-Aug-30
15.2 LD
6.5
28
2001 RQ17
2018-Sep-02
19.3 LD
8.3
107
2015 FP118
2018-Sep-03
12.3 LD
9.8
490
2017 SL16
2018-Sep-20
8.5 LD
6.4
25

Notes: LD means "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. Table from SpaceWeather.com

Near-Earth objects (NEOs) discovered this month: 1, this year: 973, all time: 18525.
Potentially hazardous asteroids: 1912 (as of July 31, 2018)
Minor Planets discovered: 779,736 (as of July 31, 2018)

Fireballs

On Aug. 6, 2018, the NASA All Sky Fireball Network reported 75 fireballs.

Fireball Orbits

In this diagram of the inner solar system, all of the fireball orbits intersect at a single point--Earth. Source: Spaceweather.com

The Solar System

This is the position of the planets and a couple spacecraft in the solar system:

Inner Solar System

Position of the planets in the inner solar system - a few days after Mars opposition - Aug 7, 2018. Credit: NASA Eyes on the Solar System / Bob Trembley.

Middle Solar System

Position of the planets in the middle solar system, Aug. 7, 2018. Credit: NASA Eyes on the Solar System / Bob Trembley.

Exoplanets

Confirmed Exoplanets: 3,774 (7/19/2018)
Multi-Planet Systems: 625 (7/19/2018 )
Kepler Candidate Exoplanets: 4,496 (8/31/2017)
TESS Candidate Exoplanets: 0
Data from the NASA Exoplanet Archive

Apps used for this post:

Stellarium: a free open source planetarium app for PC/MAC/Linux. It's a great tool for planning observing sessions.
NASA Eyes on the Solar System: an immersive 3D solar system and space mission simulator - free for the PC /MAC. I maintain the unofficial NASA Eyes Facebook page.

NASA 60th Anniversary

2018 is NASA's 60th anniversary!

Might As Well Be Walkin’ On The Sun! Parker Solar Probe Update.

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A while back, I shared with you my hope of going to see the launch of the Parker Solar Probe as part of my vacation time. Well, a new assignment later and that goal needed to be put aside. Nothing kills vacation plans like packing up your life and then unpacking it again in the space of a month. Still, I am greatly looking forward to following the Parker Solar Probe as it makes its journey to our star!

When digging around on the NASA webpage created for this mission, the technology put into this probe is mind boggling. The most basic achievement (hopefully) is the development of a probe that can survive the intense heat and radiation of the sun. Presuming this technology holds, this probe will give us information about our star that might unlock some of the great, unknown mysteries of the Sun and most likely open up new questions for exploration. In short, the Parker Solar Probe will feed one of the most basic intuitions of the human person: The desire to explore and understand this universe of wonder.

A visual of Pythagoras' demonstration of the math of the heavenly spheres.

These past few years have been a scientific goldmine of discoveries. I never thought, as a trained musician, a scientific discovery would emerge that "listened" for the sound or "music" of space through something called "gravitational waves." In music history, the study of the music of the spheres was often presented as an ancient, out-of-date understanding of our universe. Granted, gravitational waves aren't going to be mistaken for heavenly ratios of numbers that contribute to music theory anytime soon. However, the simple fact that there is a way to "listen" to space through subtle vibrations in the fabric of the universe easily captivates the imagination of this musician priest!

Image of Oldest Known Star. Image Credit: Credit: NASA, ESA, and P. Kelly, University of Minnesota

Though the discovery of signs of water on Mars is not new News, the possibility of a saltwater sea under Mars' southern pole is rather exciting. My presumption is that this well founded speculation will lead to the development of new space missions to try to both verify the existence of this salt water and then find out exactly what this "sea" is like. As is often the case with Mars discoveries, the mix of science with a wild history of science fiction about Mars creates a plethora of bad interpretations of what this discovery actually means. Still, this discovery may help shed light on one of the most basic question of the universe: Is there life outside our common home? Throw in Brenda Frye's team discovering the oldest known star in the universe, and we begin to see that this is a great time to follow the science of space!

As I have shared with you in the past, my greatest joy as a hobby astronomer is being wrapped in awe and wonder. Whether it be peering at ancient star clusters through my small, backyard telescope or gazing upon solar fares on the sun, the universe provides a constant sea of wonder, begging us to ask the big questions of life and continue to scratch the itch we all have to understand what exactly it is we are looking at. As a Catholic Priest, this curiosity bleeds into more theological questions about the origins of the universe, my origins, and the purpose of my existence. These questions remind me how many attempts have been made to define what it means to be human. Whether it be scientific, philosophical, and theological, I think one of the sturdiest starting points we can agree upon is our unique ability to wonder.

Spiritual Exercise: What is it about our universe that draws you into wonder? What are the big questions of your life that you wrestle with? Share your thoughts and, together, let us explore these questions, regardless of our faith background, to help us understand not only our origin and place in the universe, but what it means to be a part of the human family. A family of curiosity. A family of hopes. And a family full of wonder and awe - the beginning of wisdom!