Bad Astronomy

I know, it was for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but when I saw this I thought it was pretty funny.

Plus, pink is cool.

So, Star Trek Into Darkness. The new Trek movie. Big summer blockbuster. Lots of box office, lots of buzz.

Yeah, that. I didn’t like it.

Now, I didn’t hate it. It was fun, and entirely watchable. But, well, I just didn’t actively like it. It was OK for a fast-paced action movie where you can just watch and go along for the ride, but as a Trek movie it fell short. I think this reboot series still has a lot of promise, but this movie, for me, was just marking time.

Here’s why. Obviously, there are big fat spoilers here, and the movie does ride on a lot of the mysteries. So if you don’t want the flick ruined for you, go look at something else for a while. Also obviously, what follows are opinions. A lot of my friends are saying they liked or even loved this movie. That’s great! It just didn’t strike me the same way. Fairly warned be thee, says I.

Cap’n! THERE BE SPOILERS HERE.

Let me take a moment to note that usually I like to point out the science errors of a movie in my reviews. This didn’t have too many, and most were not that important. For example, I don’t think solidifying the lava in a volcano will get it to stop erupting; in fact, it’ll make it explode like a bomb due to bottling up all the pressure inside (retcon: maybe the “cold fusion bomb” prevents that). At the climactic battle they say they’re 237,000 kilometers from Earth, but wind up near the Moon; I suspect someone mixed up kilometers and miles (the Moon is 238,000 miles from Earth, which is 380,000 kilometers or so). Also, do the math: It's 2259, and they say Khan was born 300 years ago. Um, what?

[Update (May 17, 16:30 UTC): A few folks have pointed out that in the original series, Khan and the Eugenics Wars happened in the 20th century, so that birthdate is about right. I will grant you that, but given it's 2013 and the wars haven't happened yet, that was still a weird thing to say. They could have changed it; after all, they changed the way Klingons and their ships look and there's no reason for that in the rebooted timeline of Trek.]

For the most part I didn’t have too big a problem with these booboos. But I did have a problem with some of the internal Trek science, like a transwarp box that can transport you across interstellar space instantly. That was so weird it actually threw me out of the story trying to figure it out; I thought for a moment the villain used it to transport himself to a ship in orbit, which would have made a lot more sense. [UPDATE (May 18, 00:30 UTC): Oops. I forgot that transwarp beaming was established in the first reboot movie. I'm willing to admit this was an error on my part, though the idea of having that capability in a box the size of an accordian seems a bit silly. Also, it still would've made more sense for Khan to have just used a regular ship; it would've avoided the disorientation of the audience. Well, me, certainly.] There were others, but I don’t feel the need to go into too many details, because, honestly, they were secondary to the real reasons this movie didn’t resonate with me.

Stop Making Sense

I think the movie suffered from two problems: things happened which made no sense, and it had something I call “too-much-stuffism”. The latter is why it didn’t work for me as an action movie, and the former why it didn’t work for me as a Trek movie.

For example, the movie opens with the crew on a planet (sadly, named Nibiru), where they are sent to do a survey. They find out a volcano is about to explode, which will wipe out the indigenous (and primitive) humanoids there. So they hide the Enterprise under the ocean, use a shuttle to get Spock inside the volcano, and he plants that cold fusion bomb that will freeze the erupting lava in place, saving the planet.

Of course, it all goes wrong. Spock gets stranded, and they can’t beam him back due to interference from the planet’s magnetic field unless they get in a line of sight on him. So they fly the Enterprise over the volcano, and beam Spock out—who protests this, saying it will violate the Prime Directive if the natives see the ship.

This scene was fun to watch, I’ll admit, but the whole thing makes no sense. Why put the ship under water, instead of orbit directly above the volcano? That would give them line-of-sight, and they could’ve beamed Spock there and back safely without being seen as anything more than a bright light in the sky. And why not just beam the bomb into the volcano in the first place? Also, saving those humanoids all by itself was a violation of the Prime Directive, but Spock didn’t seem to have too big a problem with that.

Like I said, the scene doesn’t make any (pardon the expression) logical sense. And the whole movie is like that. I could make a laundry list of examples, but I won’t belabor it.

OK, fine, I’ll belabor one example; I can’t help myself. Near the end of the movie, the Enterprise, crippled and on the edge of destruction, spent a long time falling toward Earth from the Moon, and during all that time not a single ship shows up to help, even though they are at the very heart of the Federation. It’s like no one noticed a ship the size of football stadium plummeting toward the planet.

Things like that draw me out of the movie. It’s easy to forgive one or two of those, but it just kept happening all throughout the flick.

Khan Man

And let’s talk about Khan.

It was no surprise to me at all—despite having avoided nearly all spoilers—that he was the surprise main villain (I was pretty sure it was going to be either him or Gary Mitchell). Benedict Cumberbatch did a great job—duh—but I never felt that Khan was menacing. In the original series, with Khan and Kirk it was personal, and that connects with us, the audience. That one-on-one interplay was one of the main reasons why Wrath of Khan was such a terrific movie. It was deeply personal, and we sympathize with Kirk; we hurt when he gets hurt, and we feel his triumph when he wins. The revenge escalates with Khan’s obsession, but every time it does we ride along with it, and we feel the stakes getting higher.

With Into Darkness, that never happens. It’s never personal, and we never get the idea that Khan is a madman bent on revenge. Sure, the timeline changed, and so did his motives, but in the end what that means is that Khan was too distant. I was never invested in him. He was like a generic Bond supervillain, a plug and play bad guy.

I’ll admit, I chuckled a bit when the movie took the penultimate scene from Wrath of Khan and did a role reversal on it, with Spock and Kirk swapping places. But then Spock yelling “KHHHANNNNN!” made my eyes roll back so far in my head I think they went back in time—and any real drama was drained from that scene because we know Kirk won’t die. They had already telegraphed how they’d save him in an earlier scene…with a tribble, of all things. Compare that scene to the one where Spock dies in Wrath of Khan, and tell me which one hits you harder.

You people are all astronauts on some kind of star trek?

[Update (May 18, 15:30 UTC): What follows below is a complaint that the story-telling aspect of the movie was lacking. However, in some aspects I may have been too harsh. My Slate colleague Forrest Wickman argues convincingly this movie is a post-9/11 metaphor that, somehow, I totally missed.  Well, not totally, but certainly didn't see some of the deeper aspects he points out. I still think a lot of the movie was weak—I agree with another Slate writer, Matthew Yglesias, in his summary—but I think I'll have to go see the movie again to pick up on things I may have missed. Read what follows with that in mind, please.]

All of this boils down to story telling. There was a real story in this movie, and a good one, but it was never really allowed to bloom. And then it got buried in the too-much-stuffism.

For example, right after Kirk “dies”, Spock has to chase down Khan, who tries to crash his ship into Starfleet HQ, and then escapes, and then is chased by Spock, and then they jump from flying car to flying car, and then they fight, and then Uhura zaps him, and then Spock beats him up, and then and then and then.

I literally wanted to yell, “Stop!” It was too much. It wasn’t Starfleet people using their brains to outwit or out-bluff their opponent, it was just action without any overarching strategy.

Now I know that this will sound like a get-off-my-lawn kind of moment, but seriously: Trek isn’t supposed to be about this kind of stuff. Trek is about the relationship of the characters and the grander theme of exploration. It’s also a meta-story about us. At its best it was a deeply thoughtful mythology about ourselves and our conflicts, an allegory of our modern problems and flaws of humanity—war, greed, bigotry, narcissism—and how we overcome them, told as science fiction. That’s why we’re still telling these stories nearly 50 years later.

This movie wasn’t any of that. To quote the great story-teller Homer (Simpson, that is): It was just a bunch of stuff that happened. Fight scene, battle scene, people running, conversations, then more fighting. It had the elements of Trek, but that signal was shouted down by the noise.

A big part of what made the original movies work was the way these old friends interact. In the new timeline they’re not yet old friends, of course, but in this movie there wasn’t a lot of progress made in that direction.

In my opinion—worth what you’ve paid for it, certainly—if and when they make a third installment, they should focus on that. Strengthen the ties that bind this crew together. Over-the-top action movies have diminishing returns, diminishing value with each sequel. But think on this: Star Trek has 13 movies in the franchise. It has that staying power because of the established back story, and because of the characters, because of their history. If these new movies can tap into that, deeply and not just superficially (and rehashing it) like it did here, then it can breathe new life into this grand mythos yet.

Read more about Star Trek on Slate.

A new study has just come out that looked at nearly 12,000 professional scientific journal papers about global warming, and found that—of the papers expressing a stance on global warming—97 percent endorse both the reality of global warming and the fact that humans are causing it.

Ninety-seven percent. That’s what we call a “consensus”, folks.

The study was clever. They found the papers by searching on the terms “global warming” and “global climate change”. Once they compiled the list of papers, they looked at the abstracts (a short summary of the results scientists put at the top of their papers) to see if the paper itself talked about the causes of global warming. About 4000 of the papers did so. That may seem like a smallish fraction, but most papers analyze measurements and climate effects, not the cause of global warming (like most astronomical papers on, say, galaxies don’t discuss how galaxies form, but focus on their structure, content, and so on—also, because there is such a strong consensus on warming, scientists don't generally feel the need to state the obvious in their abstracts).

Examining those 4000 papers, the study authors determined that 97.1 percent of them endorsed the consensus that humans are causing global warming. And here’s where they did the clever bit: They contacted 8500 authors of the papers in question and asked them to self-rate those papers. They got responses from 1200 authors (a nice fraction), and, using the same criteria as the study, it turns out 97.2 percent of the authors endorse the consensus.

That’s a remarkable agreement! And it’s no surprise. There have been several studies showing almost exactly the same thing. This new one is interesting due to the methodology, and the fact that it’s so robust.

So, the bottom line: The vast majority of scientists who conduct climatological research and publish their results in professional journals say humans are the cause of global warming. There is essentially no controversy among actual climate scientists about this.

Of course, if you read the Wall Street Journal or the contrarian blogs, you might think the controversy among scientists is bigger. But you’ll find that the vast majority of people writing those articles, or who are quoted in them, are not climatologists. You’ll also find many, including politicians so vocally denying global warming, are heavily funded by fossil fuel interests, or lead institutes funded that way.

Because deniers tend to go to the OpEd pages and TV, rather than science journals, the public perception is skewed in their favor; people think this is a bigger controversy than it is. The only controversy here is a manufactured one; made up by people who are basing it on ideology, not facts, evidence, and science. That’s not just my opinion; that statement itself is backed up by facts, evidence, and science.

Global warming is real. Climate change is happening. Carbon dioxide in the air is increasing, and is at a higher level than it has been for the past three million years. That carbon dioxide is increasingly heating us up: we are warming at a rate faster than in the past 11,000 years, and most likely far longer than that.

And it’s our fault. It’s well past time we do something about it, and we need to get past this false controversy. For more information, go to The Consensus Project, and see what we can do about it.

Today is the official U.S. premiere of the new movie, Star Trek Into Darkness, and yes, I’m excited. Maybe too excited. I’m a Galaxy-class Trek dork (here's plenty of proof of that), and have been since I was a little kid. I actually liked the 2009 reboot, mostly (see below), and liked all the series and movies to a certain degree (except Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, but c’mon, right?).

Still, as a scientist, I can’t help but notice that every now and again, just sometimes, maybe, Trek ventures into some pretty dicey science territory. Let me be clear: I have no problem with faster-than-light travel, time travel, teleporters, the Universal Translator, or anything like that. Every genre has a conceit, a gimme, and in scifi that means advanced tech that we can’t necessarily explain today. That’s fine, and as long as it’s internally consistent in the story I’m happy.

My beef is usually when the plot relies on some error in science, or when the tech is used inconsistently. If you discover, say, a Fountain of Youth in one episode, you’d better establish why everyone in the Federation isn’t young after that.

Say.

Anyway, what follows are some of my bigger science nitpicks for Trek. Again, I love the show, and I’m no Comic Book Guy (Worst. Character. EVER), so I don’t want you to think I sit around waiting for movies and TV shows to make errors so I can pounce on them with a fervor of supposed superior glee and vaporize them in a laser-focused burst of anal intellect.

I used to be that way, but I’m better now.

A little.

If it helps any, I once engaged (ha! See what I did there?) in a battle of Treknobabble with Wil Wheaton, who played Wesley Crusher on Next Generation. I lost, gloriously; he bested me when it came to dilithium crystals and warp drive. A humbled man, I have moved on to become more forgiving.

Well, except for what follows. Even a humbled man has limits. So shields up, and man your battlestations: We're on a collision course…with SCIENCE.

Voyager: Warped 10

In the later series like The Next Generation (usually called TNG) and Voyager, warp speed is exponential, with Warp 10 representing literally infinite speed. In an episode of Voyager, entitled “Threshold”, the crew discovers a way of going faster than Warp 10. I’m not exactly sure how you can travel faster than infinite speed, but let’s go with it for a moment.

Upon testing, a shuttle winds up being in every point in the Universe simultaneously, which, if you’re going literally infinitely fast, at least makes a kind of weird sense. However, the effects of this cause pilot Tom Paris to start mutating, growing and absorbing various organs, which understandably makes him a little nuts. So he decides to kidnap Captain Janeway—naturally—and steal a shuttle in the hopes of going Warp 10 again.

This time, both Janeway and Paris devolve into lizards, mate, have babies, get found by the Voyager crew, and then are bombarded by anti-protons to destroy the new mutated DNA and return them to their former selves.

I know. Look, I typed that last paragraph and even I have no clue what to do with it, so let’s just say that apparently Warp 10 is a state of infinitely bad science and just move on.

The Great Barrier Beef

In the second pilot episode of the original series (“Where No Man Has Gone Before”), the Enterprise encounters an energy barrier at the edge of the galaxy. Glowing pink and purple, it is said to be impenetrable, and in later episodes they say no form of transmission gets through it, either.

Here’s the thing: In real life, we see other galaxies outside our own. That means light can get through the barrier, but apparently in the 23^rd century we’ve evolved beyond the need for light. Or something.

So I have a few problems with this. If the galaxy were enshrouded in a pink barrier, I think that would be obvious, even from Earth. After all, it would clash with the red giants. Also, as established in that episode, people with mild powers of ESP get them amplified hugely by the energy in the barrier, becoming essentially gods. Yet they cross the barrier a least one other time later in the series (“By Any Other Name”) with no ill effects. Maybe beforehand they cleared off all the crew who could do better than random chance predicting Zener cards.

And somehow, in Star Trek V, that became a barrier to the center of the galaxy, except it didn’t really exist, because God lived there, or an unreasonable facsimile thereof.

It suddenly occurs to me that people reading this who are not familiar with all the Trek shows and movies may be thinking I’ve lost my mind. That may or may not be the case, but never fear! We can fix my brain with transporter technology!

Fixing Things With Transporter Technology

The transporter was always a trusty piece of tech to either get someone out of a sticky situation, or to fail in such a way to put them into one. Many an episode relied on it in some way as a plot device. That’s fine, up to a point, but for some reason any actual advances made using it were forgotten by the time the credits roll.

In the TNG episode “Unnatural Selection”, Doctor Pulaski is infected with a disease that alters her DNA, rapidly aging her. She is about to die of old age when Captain Picard realizes they can use the transporter to cure her. They get a sample of her DNA from before she was infected, use it as a filter, and then fix her altered DNA.

It works (duh), with her instantly reverting back to her old young self after being beamed aboard.

Ignoring for the moment that she wouldn’t just transform back to being youthful—your current DNA isn’t a blueprint of the way you look right now (including hair style!)—there’s also the small problem that this transporter rejuvenation technique is a veritable Fountain of Youth. Just save a sample of your DNA from when you’re young—I’ll take the age of 25, please—and when you get old just step into a transporter, and poof! You’re young again.

Heck, you could even change your DNA! I’d like a little more hair, a touch redder, and a few centimeters added to my height, please. I rather like the way I am now, but I wouldn’t object to a few, um, modifications.

"Then they hurl heavy objects. And claw at you."

Speaking of DNA, this brings up a broader point about Trek: interspecies breeding (which, honestly, is an oxymoron). In the Trek universe alien races can interbreed (presumably, with a bit of technological help); Spock himself is a human-Vulcan hybrid. But that seems…unlikely. Think of it this way: We share 98 percent or so of our DNA with chimpanzees, yet cannot successfully breed with them. And we evolved on the same planet as chimps, with a common ancestor in our genetic lines just a few million years ago.

Even if you accept the idea from the TNG episode “The Chase”, where ancient aliens seeded planets throughout this quadrant with their own DNA—explaining why so many species are humanoids—over a few million years the drift in the genetic code would make humans and chimps seem like a couple made in OK Cupid heaven compared to even the most attractive of Vulcans. And even if you could somehow make it work, I think pon farr might make things a bit dodgy for the human involved. In vitro might be their best option anyway.

And don’t even get me started on sex with a Klingon. That’s a recipe for an ER visit at the very least.

It’s Just a Phase

OK, this one breaks my own rule about ignoring tech mistakes as long as it’s used consistently, but it bugs me.

What happens to a person when they’re hit by a phaser set to “kill”?

In the show, they always glow and then they’re…gone. Poof. Disappeared.

But that makes no sense. If the phaser is a high-energy weapon (which they mention a few times in TNG) then it would vaporize the target. But that would cause a big explosion; you’re heating someone up to very high temperatures, so at the very least the steam explosion (from all your water content vaporizing) would be hellish. Anyone within ten meters would suffer terrible burns. And probably severely task the capabilities of even a 24^th century dry cleaner.

It’s not clear exactly what a phaser does, though. Maybe it phases you out of existence, into a different time or space or some weird thing like that. But that seems unnecessarily cruel for the peaceful Federation.

Like I said, it’s not a big deal, but I still find it (wait for it, wait for iiiitttt) stunning.

[UPDATE (May 18, 16:00 UTC): After posting this, I heard from my old friend Rick Sternbach, who did art and design work for TNG and developed much of the look and feel of the series. He also wrote the TNG Tech Manual, specifically the section on phasers, so he may be regarded as something of an authority here. He confirms that yes, a phaser set to "kill" actually does send the particles of the target "somewhere else", presumably subspace. It's not defined what happens to them there, but in terms of the person getting zapped, the answer is probably nothing good. I'm satisfied with this answer, admittedly in some small part because it means my guess was right. I'll note that this idea was dreamed up long after the original series aired, and does an admirable job backwards-fitting all the things known about phasers (even the name) to make a logically consistent explanation.]

Working for Scale

The 2009 Star Trek reboot movie was a lot of fun (I reviewed it when it came out), and introduced quite a bit of new tech and science into the show. I know, I know: The “red matter” irked me too, but inside the story I figure it’s just a plot device, and I’m willing (grudgingly) to let it go.

Actually, the misuse of science that got me was when we see (“our”) Spock standing on the planet Delta Vega, and he watches the planet Vulcan collapse into a black hole. It seems innocuous enough… but to an astronomer that was a cardinal sin.

The problem is distance. Unless Delta Vega were a moon of Vulcan (and in the original series Spock says his planet has no moon), the planet would be way, way too far away to see as anything but a point of light in the sky. And that’s if it’s in the same star system; from another star, even Vulcan’s star might be too far away to see (also, Delta Vega is established in the original series as a remote planet, the location of a dilithium mining station).

That’s the sort of science abuse that, despite my better nature, pulls me right out of the movie. I’m sure most people wouldn’t have given it a second thought, but to an astronomer it's like being served a bowl of cold, dead gagh.

The Adventure Continues

I could go on and on. Plasma fires, exploding stars sterilizing galaxies, polarizing hulls, inverting the decyon field, the transporter turning people into children, humans devolving into spiders and lemurs and fish. It’s a target-rich environment.

But, there’s a lot Trek gets right as well. It predicted ion drives, floppy disks, and flip-open phones, for example, and there’s work right now to make a medical tricorder.

But my favorite science prediction it made was a tacit one: The galaxy is filled with planets. That was completely unknown in the 1960s; heck, even by the time TNG aired only a handful of planets had been found orbiting other stars. Now we know that a large fraction of stars have planets, and in fact planets may outnumber stars in the galaxy!

That’s a pretty cool thing to get right. I prefer a galaxy filled with planets, and possibly life, to one that’s empty and void. Star Trek inspired me when I was a kid, feeding my craving for science and aliens; I became an astronomer in no small part due to the boost I got from shows like it. Science fiction like Trek is filled with tales of high adventure, hopping from one planet to the next, seeking out new life and new civilizations, people working together peacefully for a common purpose. That is a profoundly hopeful future, one where we make it off this planet and into the depths of space. Maybe in real life we won’t meet aliens like us, but to even get the chance to try is a goal worth pursuing.

And that’s a big reason, despite my snarky joking about it here, the science errors strewn throughout Trek don’t really bug me. There’s a much bigger picture, a grander goal, to be had.

As Kirk himself said, all we need is that sense of enterprise.

Read more about Star Trek on Slate.

Last week, the Kepler spacecraft software detected an abnormal drift in the pointing of the observatory. As it was designed to do, the software sent the spacecraft into safe mode (putting the observatory to sleep, so to speak) and alerted engineers on the ground. When Kepler was restarted, Reaction Wheel 4 wouldn’t start back up. These wheels are needed to point the telescope; it needs three for normal operation. Reaction Wheel number 2 failed in 2012, so Kepler’s been running on that minimum of three for many months. With this new wheel problem, the mission itself is in danger.

It’s not clear how much danger, though. Once they initially found the wheel hadn’t restarted, engineers put full torque on its motor, but the wheel still wouldn’t move. In a press conference today, NASA said engineers are working on ways of possibly restarting the wheel, including trying to run it backwards, or starting and stopping it several times.

Even if the wheel doesn’t start back up, engineers think they can use the thrusters on board the spacecraft to help point it. That’s a pretty crude method and far from ideal, but may be possible to extend the mission.

I’m not willing to say the primary mission is over for sure, but this sounds pretty bad. With only two wheels, pointing won’t be as accurate. If they can get Reaction Wheel 4 back up, great! If not, well, we’ll see.

Kepler was launched in 2009, and its mission is to look for planets orbiting other stars. It does this by staring about 150,000 stars at the same time, and carefully measuring their brightness. If a planet orbits the star, and the orbit is lined up so the planet passes directly in front of the star from our view, it will block a tiny bit of the star’s light. This dip is usually at most only about 1 percent of the total light, and can be far smaller—it depends on the size of the star and the size of the planet—so this is painstaking work.

Despite that, Kepler data have revealed hundreds of planets, and there are thousands more candidates; potential planets that have been detected but not yet confirmed. Kepler’s found planets more massive than Jupiter, systems with more than one Earth-sized planet in them, and ones smaller than Mercury. It’s also found planets in the habitable zones of their stars. Not only that, but it has four years of data in its archives, so even if no more are ever taken, that’s a treasure trove of astronomical observations that will be studied for years to come.

It’s entirely possible the data already taken contain the faint signal of an Earth-sized, Earth-mass planet orbiting a star at the right distance for liquid water to exist on it. Such a signal can be very difficult to tease out, but just waiting to be found.

Also, NASA is planning the next generation of planet-finding mission: TESS, for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, will consists of an array of four telescopes, sweeping a large area of the sky and examining more than 500,000 stars for planets. It’s scheduled for launch in 2017. In the meantime, there are several other observatories looking for exoplanets as well.

I’ll note that the Kepler mission was extended in 2012 after its primary run, and even if no more data are taken, it’s been by all counts wildly successful, increasing our knowledge hugely about planets orbiting other stars. While this potential loss of Kepler is cause for concern, it is by no means our last chance to search the Universe for other worlds. We’re just starting this exploration, and there are billions more planets out there to find.

Remember the amazing picture I posted last week of the squashed, eclipsed Sun rising into the Australian sky? That photo was part of a time-lapse video that, at the time, was being put together by photographers Colin Legg and Geoff Sims.

They finished it. Trust me: Take two minutes of your life, make this full screen, sit back, and be in awe of the show nature puts on for us.

Phenomenal.

This eclipse was from last week, May 10, when the Moon passed directly in front of the Sun. The Moon’s orbit is elliptical, and it happened to be at a point where it is farther away than average when the eclipse occurred. Usually, the Moon and Sun are about the same size in the sky, but in this case the Moon’s added distance made it a bit smaller, and it couldn’t completely cover the Sun’s face. It left a ring, or annulus, of Sun circling the Moon’s silhouetted disk.

There were three major effects playing together to make this cosmic ballet so amazing. One is simply the daily turning of the Earth, so that we see the Moon and Sun rising. The second is atmospheric effects distorting the shape of the two as they rose. Near the horizon, this effect is very pronounced; it acts to flatten objects, so as they rise they look like they stretch out into their normal shape.

The third is the slowest, but most amazing of all. The Moon is orbiting the Earth, and that motion, as seen in this video, is in almost the opposite direction of the Sun and Moon rising. So it looks like the Sun is rising a hair faster than the Moon, changing the phase and shape of the eclipse. The eclipse goes from a full ring to a crescent, the horns pointing downward, shrinking as the two rise at different paces.

The combination—sunrise, vertical expansion, and changing phase—becomes a gorgeous and smoothly surreal view of two of our nearest celestial neighbors. We see them almost every day, and even those of us who observe and appreciate them all the time will stand and gawk in awe when they work together in this way.

My thanks to both Legg and Simms for sending me their photos, and alerting me to this movingly poetic video. I hope they continue to watch and photograph the skies, allowing all of us to participate in these spectacular events vicariously through them.

Here’s something I didn’t know happened: Under the right conditions, the exhaust from ships plying the ocean can form clouds, leaving tracks criss-crossing the sky.

This image, taken by NASA’s Earth-observing Terra satellite on Apr. 20, 2013, shows some of these long thin clouds (called ship tracks) in the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska. Actually, there’s quite a bit going on here, and the ship tracks are just one part.

The tracks themselves can be seen as the mostly linear clouds all over the bottom of the picture. What happens is that the ships emit aerosols—tiny particles—in their exhaust. Water vapor in the air condenses around the particles, forming tiny spheres of water: cloud droplets. As the ship moves, these trace its path like airplane contrails, and over time the ship tracks can have their shape bent by winds.

The curlicue in the lower center caught my eye, and I knew right away what it was: part of a von Kármán vortex, a spinning parcel of air downwind from an obstacle like an island. Sure enough, if you look above the vortex you’ll find another, and then above that a tiny island, a patch of greenish-brown poking through a clear spot in the clouds. Well, tiny on this scale: That’s Tanaga Island, and it’s actually over 40 kilometers (24 miles) long! The whole image shown here is about 650 km (400 miles) across—roughly the size of my home state of Colorado—and it’s only one part of an even bigger shot.

I was also drawn to the ripples to the east (right) of Tanaga, and it turns out those are not due to ships at all, but are still called “ship wave clouds”! That’s because of their resemblance to the wake of a boat, and they form in a similar way. Winds blowing past volcanoes in the island chain whip around and over the peaks. As they do, they form that V-shape like foamy water off the bow of a ship (hence the name). As the air flows past, it also rises and falls like the ripples in a sheet. The air at the top of the ripples is cooler, and the water can condense to form clouds. At the troughs, the air is warmer and clearer. If the air were dry you’d never see those ripples, but the water vapor in them makes the pattern visible.

I am endlessly fascinated by clouds and the patterns they make. I’m spoiled living in Boulder; the Rocky Mountains are upwind, and constantly sculpting the clouds into amazing shapes. But it also helps to have an eye in the sky, too, looking down on us and sending back amazing and beautiful pictures like this one.

[UPDATE (May 15, 02:15 UTC): Make that four: That spot just blew out a fourth flare, this one topping out at X1.2.]

The Sun has been a bit quiet lately, with only minor hiccups of activity here and there. But that changed on May 13, when a sunspot just over the Sun’s limb erupted in the most powerful flare so far this year.

But it didn’t stop there: A few hours later it flipped out again, blasting out an even more power flare… and then again a third flare erupted, more powerful than the last two!

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory caught the whole thing, so I put together a short video showing the first two parts of this dramatic three-act play.

The scale of this is hard to grasp. Flares are caused when the magnetic field lines of the Sun get tangled up, and then snap, releasing their energy. The amount of energy is beyond staggering: It’s equivalent to millions of nuclear weapons all going off simultaneously! Astronomers classify flares according to the energy released; B and C are the lowest, then M, and then X-class flares at the top of the scale. Each class is a factor of ten more powerful than the one below.

These three were all X-class, and in order they were X1.7, X2.8 and X3.2. That means the last of the three was nearly twice as powerful as the first. All three triggered coronal mass ejections, huge expulsions of billions of tons of material out into space. The last one was so big it will probably catch up with and ram into the earlier two.

I’ll note none of this presents a danger to us on Earth (though we have space probes that may catch the edge of these blasts, and the operators have been notified). But it’s a good reminder that the Sun is still on the low side of its 11 year peak. It’s been relaxed lately, but that doesn’t mean it won’t freak out again over the next few months.

And that’s exactly why we study it. Big eruptions can damage satellites, interrupt communications, and even cause blackouts on Earth. Our eyes in the sky give us a better view, and more importantly, advance warning. Hopefully, if the Sun does decide to aim something our way, well have enough time to deal with it. Satellites can be shut down, power can be shunted through different parts of the grid, and damage minimized. The Earth's atmopshere protects us fragile humans on the surface, too. But our electronics are expensive, our economy depnds on them, and we have to be aware of the Sun's potential influence on them.

Astronomy and space exploration can pay off, folks. Quite literally, in this case.

Los Angeles is a fun town—as long as you’re not a) driving around in it, or 2) trying to see any stars except for the TV and movie kind.

It’s a big city, and a lot of the light used to illuminate it goes into the sky. We call this “light pollution”, because it’s wasted, and also because it can ruin the view of the sky. LA is particularly bad because it’s spread out over a huge area, and to see anything at all in the sky you have to get really, really far out of town.

So I will admit to being pretty skeptical when I first saw the picture below: it purports to show the Milky Way—the faint fuzzy band of light strewn across the sky from our galaxy itself—seen over LA!

Seriously, right? That’s nuts.

But it’s also real. It was taken by Aaron Kiely, who works on spacecraft data at NASA’s JPL, and who’s familiar with techniques to squeeze extra information out of them. That lends him more credence right away. He also has a more detailed explanation of how he put the image together on his Flickr page, and after reading it I was satisfied it’s legit; the techniques he used were very similar to ones I used myself back when I worked on Hubble images!

The idea is that even when you have a very bright foreground (like LA), the fainter background (like the Milky Way) is still there, it’s just that the photons from it are vastly outnumbered. But if you take lots and lots of pictures, those photons build up. Then you can add the pictures together to create one where you can see fainter objects.

The problem is the Earth spins, so the Milky Way and the stars in the sky move. Normally you could just shift all the pictures to line them up, but in this case, though, Kiely used a wide-angle 11mm lens, so the pictures are distorted. That makes a simple shift much harder to do. So instead, he used some math to make a model of how the stars moved across the frame of the picture over time. This created a series of curved lines, all different depending on where they were in the frame:

That is essentially a map, a grid, showing where a star would be given its position and the time the picture was taken. He then used that model to warp each image, placing them all on a common frame, and added them together:

Cool. The Milky Way can now be seen, but it’s still faint; the bright sky is still swamping the Milky Way light. He needed to subtract it, reduce its influence. So Kiely turned to math once again.

Imagine the sky were the same brightness everywhere. All you’d need to do is find out what that value is (using Photoshop or any number of other image manipulation packages) and subtract it. But the sky brightness changes from spot to spot. Kiely wrote some software that examined the sky brightness all over the image and made a smooth two-dimensional map of it—like how throwing a blanket over a bunch of boxes on the floor smooths out their bumpiness. For those math nerds out there, he fit a polynomial to the background excluding stars and the landscape at the bottom, fed the coefficients into a least squares fit routine, and boom. 2D map made.

Subtracting that from his co-added picture, and voilà! You get the Milky Way hanging eerily over Lalaland.

Well, almost. Shifting and adding all the images together blurred out the hills and city at the bottom, so he took the nice, sharper shot of that from one of the single pictures and replaced the blurred portions.

Some people might think this is “cheating”, since so much manipulation is involved. I can understand that, but I’m not so upset. First of all, this is art, not science. Well, it is science; science used to make art. And it’s beautiful.

But moreover, let me ask you this: What isn’t cheating? A camera by its very nature shows us things our eyes cannot see. It collects light for far longer than our eyes do, it responds to color differently than our eyes do, it converts light to digital data, and it even performs a lot of mathematical manipulation of the picture before we even see it.

For some, “cheating” is when you’re showing something in the picture that wasn’t there in the first place… but even then it may not be so bad; astronomers combine images from different telescopes all the time. I only get upset by that when it’s presented as an actual photo; the person doesn’t let you know it’s been manipulated. Honesty is the best policy.

So to me, what Kiely did is not only legit, but also useful. He was able to tease out information that was in his pictures but far too faint to see in any one shot. And the result is amazing.

Tip o' the lens cap to FakeAstroPix on Twitter.

Over the past few years, the Canadian government has been lurching into antiscience territory. For example, they’ve been muzzling scientists, essentially censoring them from talking about their research. Scientists have fought back against this, though from what I hear with limited success.

But a new development makes the situation appear to be far worse. In a stunning announcement, the National Research Council—the Canadian scientific research and development agency—has now said that they will only perform research that has “social or economic gain”.

This is not a joke. I wish it were.

John MacDougal, President of the NRC, literally said, “Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value”. Gary Goodyear, the Canadian Minister of State for Science and Technology, also stated “There is [sic] only two reasons why we do science and technology. First is to create knowledge ... second is to use that knowledge for social and economic benefit. Unfortunately, all too often the knowledge gained is opportunity lost.”

I had to read the article two or three times to make sure I wasn’t missing something, because I was thinking that no one could possibly utter such colossally ignorant statements. But no, I was reading it correctly. These two men—leaders in the Canadian scientific research community—were saying, out loud and clearly, that the only science worth doing is what lines the pocket of business.

This is monumentally backwards thinking. That is not the reason we do science. Economic benefits are results of doing research, but should not be the reason we do it. Basic scientific research is a vast endeavor, and some of it will pay off economically, and some won’t. In almost every case, you cannot know in advance which will do which.

In the 19^th century, for example, James Clerk Maxwell was just interested in understanding electricity and magnetism. He didn’t do it for monetary benefit, to support a business, or to maximize a profit. Yet his research led to the foundation of our entire economy today. Computers, the Internet, communication, satellites, everything you plug in or that uses a battery, stem from the work he did simply because of his own curiosity. I strongly suspect that if he were to apply to the NRC for funding under this new regime, he’d be turned down flat. The kind of work Maxwell did then is very difficult to do without support these days, and we need governments to provide that help.

In his statement above, Goodyear did throw in a mention of “social benefit”, and I’ll agree that does motivate many scientists—making life better for people is a strong incentive—but again, you cannot always know what research will do that and what won’t.

And that’s OK, because it’s not like the money is wasted when invested in science. For one thing, the amount of money we’re talking about here is tiny, tiny, compared to a national budget. For another, investment in science always pays off. Always, and at a very high rate. If you want to boost your economy in the middle and long run, one of the best ways to do it is invest in science.  Instead of slicing away the scope of what scientists can do to save pennies and focus on narrower goals, the government should be increasing their budget and widening their vision.

But the Canadian government is doing the precise opposite. If proposed and immediate economic benefits are the prime factors in choosing what science to fund, then the freedom of this human endeavor will be critically curtailed. It’s draining the passion and heart out of one of the best things we humans do.

By doing this, the Canadian government and the NRC have literally sold out science