Things not about the State of the Union

School shootings since Sandy Hook.

What did Congress just do to the IRS?

More crude spilled  in 2013 Than Previous Four Decades Combined... or oil spill?  What oil spill?

Exploding neighborhood novas

Petition to keep China from processing our chickens.  (via Steve Bates)

Free art books from the Getty Museum.  In fact, free education!

Here is a cat playing a theremin.

Gems of space

In all their Hubble glory.

Fireflies and star trails

Click to embiggen.

Questions questions questions....

This would explain a lot:

Parallel universe?!

Cat fight?

Rush Limbaugh Picks On Karl Rove For Tea Party Comments

They're never going away, are they?

Creationism lives on in US public schools

A Cirrate octopus (rare and therefore extinctly edible?):



Coming around to see ourselves going?

Astronomers find oldest galaxy yet

Oh NOES!!!

We're all gonna diiiiiiiieeeee.....

What if the sun's magnetic field weakened so much that it wasn't able to muster the strength to produce a single sunspot?

This scenario may sound a little odd, but according to researchers at the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson, Arizona, the sun is exhibiting a strange decline in magnetic strength, the driving factor behind sunspot production.

It's as if our nearest star is getting tired and wants to take a breather.

[snip]

If the decreasing trend continues its downward slope, by 2016, the average sunspot magnetic field has the potential to be below this 1500 Gauss threshold, leading to the possibility that the sun will generate no sunspots.

The last time this happened in documented history was in the 17th and 18th century when the sun didn't produce any sunspots for decades. This extended period of calm, known as the Maunder Minimum, coincided with an extended period of cooling on Earth, a period called the Little Ice Age.

Are we witnessing another slow-down in solar magnetic activity? Could this be a part of a long-period cycle where the sun runs out of juice and forgets to produce sunspots every few hundred years?

Wait a second... this info doesn't match what I posted in June.... even though we know what we are facing in only 5 billion years or so anyway....

But wait! There's a MONSTER in the center of our galaxy!!1!! We're all gonna diiiiiiieeeeee....

Starry starry night

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

The nuclear bomb and the giant slingshot ideas failed?

Going through nine different ways to save Earth from a meteor, it was decided this was feasible:

London, England (AHN) - Scientists at the University of Glasgow say that flying mirrors could save earth from a catastrophic asteroid collision. In assessing a number of plans for diverting asteroids that could hit the Earth, the researchers have concluded that mirrors offer the best solution.

The plan called "solar sublimation" focuses space-based mirrors onto the object to heat it up and deflect its course. An object 150 meters across could be diverted by 100 mirrors in just a few days, according to the researchers.

Scientists now plan to use up to 5,000 mirrors to focus a beam of sunlight on to the asteroid that would in turn melt the rock and alter its orbital path away from earth.
The announcement came after the scientists compared nine different methods of deflecting near earth objects - asteroids and comets.

Project leader Dr. Massimiliano Vasile told the BBC, "Asteroid impacts are a real threat. The Tunguska explosion in 1908 devastated an area bigger than Greater London.

"With only 10 spacecraft flying in formation, each with a 20-metre mirror, we could deflect a similar sized asteroid into a safe orbit in about six months. Our studies show that this technology is genuinely feasible," he added.

And more astronomy:

Hawaii (AHN) - A tiny galaxy located 6 billion light-years away, or nearly halfway across the universe has recently been spotted and weighed by astronomers at an observatory in Hawaii.

It was discovered by Phil Marshall of the University of California, Santa Barbara and his colleagues. The galaxy was dubbed SDSSJ0737+3216. It is 100 times lighter than Earth's own Milky Way and it is the smallest galaxy ever identified at that distance.

It is about half the size and approximately one-tenth the "weight" of typical small galaxies found closer to Earth.

SDSSJ0737+3216 was discovered using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

It was made visible by a phenomenon called gravity lensing, whereby light from a distant source is warped by the gravitational field of another massive object located directly in front of it.

I love stories like these. Scientists discovering stuff.

Objects in mirror are closer that they appear

This is what science does so well, reconsider, recalculate, reassess. The desire of those fundamentalists to declare this process indecisive or changeable exposes their own inability to understand.

The most accurate catalogue of the distances to more than 100,000 stars has just been released.

Cambridge astronomer Dr Floor van Leeuwen has spent the past 10 years checking and recalculating data gathered by the Hipparcos satellite.

It collected the information in the 1990s, but questions were raised about apparent errors in the results.

Dr van Leeuwen, who saw a flaw in the way Hipparcos worked, has now corrected the star distances.

[snip]

"The discovery of the problem with the satellite left me with no option but to recalculate the data," Dr van Leeuwen explained. "I knew that it could be done and I knew that the existing data could be significantly improved in all aspects, so I had no choice.

"It was an extremely painful process. You can spend a whole weekend examining one small part of the data, and making the resultant corrections can take two weeks. But the result is that we now have a catalogue more accurate than ever before, and one in which we know that all the calculations work."

Ultimately, Hipparcos' astrometric data has altered our view of the cosmos. Its distance scale found the Universe to be bigger and younger than some thought.

There's no place like home

If they'd only stop changing the address...

Imagine the shock of growing up in a loving family with people you call "Mum" and "Dad" and then, suddenly, learning that you are actually adopted!

This same sense of shock came as scientists announced that the Sun, the Moon, our planet and its siblings, were not born into the familiar band of stars known as the Milky Way galaxy, but we actually belong to a strange formation with the unfamiliar name of the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy!

[snip]

Using volumes of data from the Two-Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), a major project to survey the sky in infrared light led by the University of Massachusetts, the astronomers are answering questions that have baffled scientists for decades and proving that our own Milky Way is consuming one of its neighbors in a dramatic display of ongoing galactic cannibalism. The study published in the Astrophysical Journal, is the first to map the full extent of the Sagittarius galaxy and show in visually vivid detail how its debris wraps around and passes through our Milky Way. Sagittarius is 10,000 times smaller in mass than the Milky Way, so it is getting stretched out, torn apart and gobbled up by the bigger Milky Way.

The Red Square Nebula

From this site.

What could cause a nebula to appear square? No one is quite sure. The hot star system known as MWC 922, however, appears to be imbedded in a nebula with just such a shape. The above image combines infrared exposures from the Hale Telescope on Mt. Palomar in California, and the Keck-2 Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. A leading progenitor hypothesis for the square nebula is that the central star or stars somehow expelled cones of gas during a late developmental stage. For MWC 922, these cones happen to incorporate nearly right angles and be visible from the sides. Supporting evidence for the cone hypothesis includes radial spokes in the image that might run along the cone walls. Researchers speculate that the cones viewed from another angle would appear similar to the gigantic rings of supernova 1987A, possibly indicating that a star in MWC 922 might one day itself explode in a similar supernova.

All I know is that it is beautiful and glorious.