esiegel | December 3, 2012"Who is wise? He that learns from everyone.
Who is powerful? He that governs his passions.
Who is rich? He that is content.
Who is that? Nobody." -Benjamin Franklin
Welcome to Messier Monday, where each week we take a journey into one of the 110 objects in the Messier Catalogue of non-cometary deep-sky objects. Ranging from stellar remnants to star clusters to globular clusters to distant galaxies and more, the Messier objects tell a rich and varied story that you can share in yourself through even the simplest of astronomical instruments.
Image credit: Rich Richins, of all 110 Messier…
esiegel | December 2, 2012"A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting." -Henry David Thoreau
Every day that we have free or leisure time, there's this great conflict as to how we spend it: working to better ourselves and improve our knowledge, and taking the time to enjoy our lives in whatever way we see fit. Sometimes, this goes horribly awry, as the B-52s would attest in their (relatively) new song,
Funplex.
But there's often no better way to combine these two pursuits than by reading a good book.…
esiegel | November 30, 2012"You don't drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there." -Edwin Louis Cole
Our Solar System is -- at least from our perspective -- the most well-studied system of planets, moons, asteroids and comets in the entire Universe.
Image credit: Olaf Frohn, from earlier in 2012.
And in this system, the closest planet to our Sun, Mercury, was also one of the most poorly understood planets until very recently. Because Mercury is so close to the Sun, it's very difficult to view it under good conditions with a telescope; the risk of ruining your optics by exposing them to direct sunlight…
esiegel | November 28, 2012"Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night." -Hal Borland
Of course you know the danger that would befall us if the Earth ever got too close to the Sun, as the Perry Bible Fellowship shows, atop. But have you ever stopped to think about the Moon in our skies, and what would happen if the Earth and Moon were closer together than they actually are?
Image credit: NASA / Galileo mission.
While photos such as this -- from the Galileo spacecraft -- accurately show the relative size and illumination of the Earth and…
esiegel | November 26, 2012"The man's a born straggler... another lucky exception to the rules of natural selection. A million years ago he would've been an easy snack for a saber-toothed tiger." -Carl Hiaasen
Welcome to the latest Messier Monday, where each week we take a look at one of Charles Messier's original catalogue of 110 deep-sky objects that comet-hunters might easily confuse with those transient passers-by in our Solar System.
Image credit: Greg Scheckler, from his 2008 Messier marathon, where he nabbed 105/110.
Quite to the contrary, each of the 110 objects in the Messier catalogue are (semi-)permanent…
esiegel | November 24, 2012“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, 'Wow! What a Ride!'” -Hunter S. Thompson
For those of you who've never experienced exactly what it feels like to alter your perceptions, and for those of you who have but don't want to spend hours and hours experiencing the effects, your options have traditionally been limited. Perhaps a song might provide a window into the experience for you, such as M. Ward's…
esiegel | November 21, 2012“We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.” -George Bernard Shaw
All that is real about ourselves is nothing to be ashamed about; quite to the contrary, it's something to be eminently thankful for. This very existence is all we have, and while it's minuscule compared to the entire Universe, it required the entire Universe to bring us to the point where it's possible for us to exist.
What do I mean by…
esiegel | November 19, 2012"When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system." -Kalpana Chawla
Welcome to this week's Messier Monday, where I pick a new object out of the original catalogue of 110 "faint fuzzies" designed to help comet-hunters avoid confusion with these fixed, extended night sky objects.
Image credit: The Messier Objects by Alistair Symon, from 2005-2009.
In previous weeks, we've focused on a variety of objects, including a globular cluster, an open star cluster, a supernova remnant and an active star-forming nebula…
esiegel | November 17, 2012“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” -Niels Bohr
One of the most amazing recent technological innovations is the advent of 3D Printing, where any shaped or textured object can be accurately reproduced with the right software and printing materials. The things that I've seen made so far have been so creative that I thought the right song to take you through what I'm about to show you is Ween's upbeat (and amusing) song,
Voodoo Lady.
Over at the fantastic do-it-yourself website, Instructables, they're currently having a competition called Make it Real,…
esiegel | November 16, 2012"Other than the laws of physics, rules have never really worked out for me." -Craig Ferguson
Earlier this week, evidence was presented measuring a very rare decay rate -- albeit not incredibly precisely -- which point towards the Standard Model being it as far as new particles accessible to colliders (such as the LHC) go. In other words, unless we get hit by a big physics surprise, the LHC will become renowned for having found the Higgs Boson and nothing else, meaning that there's no window into what lies beyond the Standard Model via traditional experimental particle physics.
Image credit:…
esiegel | November 14, 2012"...this consensus has been brought about, not by shifts in philosophical preference or by the influence of astrophysical mandarins, but by the pressure of empirical data." -Steven Weinberg
One of the most fundamental questions we could ever ask about all of existence is "What makes up the Universe?"
Image credit: Misti Mountain Observatory.
I don't mean "stars and galaxies," like you see above. That might make up the Universe on the largest scales, but that's taking a look at the question of what the fundamental constituents of the Universe compose themselves into.
The other side of the…
esiegel | November 12, 2012"When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old." -Mark Twain
Welcome to yet another installment of Messier Monday, where each week, I'll pick one of the 110 Messier Objects -- deep-sky objects catalogued to avoid confusion for comet hunters -- to highlight for you.
Image(s) credit: SEDS -- http://messier.seds.org/.
So far, we've taken a look at a supernova remnant, a young open star cluster, and an active star-forming nebula, a testament to the great diversity of these faint, fuzzy objects that might be easily confused with a comet. Today…
esiegel | November 11, 2012“There is no such thing as magic, supernatural, miracle; only something that's still beyond logic of the observer.” -Toba Beta
It might be hard to believe, but science tells us truths about the Universe that we might never have intuited or philosophized about if the Universe itself didn't reveal them to us through investigation. Bap Kennedy alludes to this in one of my favorite songs by him,
Mostly Water,
and this is certainly true of Einstein's relativity, which details just how the Universe behaves when we move close to the speed of light. This is notoriously difficult to visualize or gain…
esiegel | November 8, 2012"You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it." -Henry Louis Gates
When it comes to stars, their fates are very well known. Every single star that's massive enough to fuse hydrogen into helium in its core will someday run out of fuel and die.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, F. Paresce, R. O'Connell, & the HST WFC3 Science Oversight Committee.
The very brightest and most massive stars -- about 1-in-800 of all stars -- will die in a spectacular, core-collapse supernova when their core burns fuel all the way through iron and finally runs out of room to go.
This…
esiegel | November 7, 2012"It's a brilliant surface in that sunlight." - Neil Armstrong
Indeed, all that glitters so brilliantly in the cosmos does so because of the stars that have formed throughout it.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team.
Over the 14 billion-or-so years that our Universe has been around, we've formed hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone.
Image credit: ESO / Serge Brunier (TWAN), Frederic Tapissier.
Given that our galaxy is just one of at least hundreds of billions in the observable Universe, the number of stars that have formed over our Universe's history is a…
esiegel | November 5, 2012"I hate that expression, 'fusion.' What it means to me is this movement where nothing ever really fused." -Wayne Kramer
Welcome to another Messier Monday, where each week, I pick one of the 110 Messier Objects -- deep-sky objects catalogued to avoid confusion for comet hunters -- to highlight and detail.
Image(s) credit: SEDS -- http://messier.seds.org/.
This week, I'd like to highlight one of only two star-forming nebulae visible to the naked eye in the night sky, and I want to do it before it disappears completely for the year! Visible for just an hour or so after sunset right now towards…
esiegel | November 3, 2012"Only the knife knows what goes on in the heart of a pumpkin." -Simone Schwarz-Bart
With Halloween just behind us, the only things that pumpkins may mean to you now are pie, soups, or -- as John Prine would sing you -- a condescending term of affection, as in,
Daddy's Little Pumpkin.
But I recently came across the most amazing Jack-O-Lantern I've ever seen, where someone turned a pumpkin into a working, playable game of tetris!
Image credit: "Pumpktris" by Nathan at http://www.hahabird.com/.
This idea -- and the design -- is nothing short of brilliant. The pumpkin itself was an intricately…
esiegel | November 2, 2012"The important point is that since the origin of life belongs in the category of at least once phenomena, time is on its side. However improbable we regard this event, or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at-least-once. And for life as we know it, with its capacity for growth and reproduction, once may be enough." -George Wald
That there's an amazing story of life's evolution on Earth is a scientific certainty. The evidence is encoded in the nucleic acid sequences of every living organism ever discovered, and the history of life on this…
esiegel | October 31, 2012"A cosmic mystery of immense proportions, once seemingly on the verge of solution, has deepened and left astronomers and astrophysicists more baffled than ever. The crux ... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing." -William J. Broad
Despite the wondrous, luminous sights of the night sky, we've learned that normal matter -- protons, neutrons, electrons and the like -- make up only 4% of the total energy in the Universe.
Image credit: Large Suite of Dark Matter Simulations (LasDamas) simulation; Vanderbilt.
The galaxies and clusters of galaxies lighting up…
esiegel | October 29, 2012"Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter,
Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades." -Walt Whitman
Last week, we kicked off our very first Messier Monday by spotlighting M1: the Crab Nebula. But with 110 different objects to choose from, the Messier catalogue represents some of the brightest and most universally accessible wonders of the night sky.
Image(s) credit: SEDS -- http://messier.seds.org/.
Many of these…