Astroblog

Apollo 11 lunar module, Eagle. Image Credit NASA/LRO.

About 4 am on 21 July Australian Eastern Standard Time in 1968, Apollo 11 Lunar Lander Eagle touched down in the Sea of Tranquillity on the Moon. At 12.56 pm the famous Moonwalk began watch by this school boy, amongst millions of others.

At 4 am this morning I was asleep, I wasn't even visiting the Moon in my dreams (I was at a cafe with my family in my dream, eating soup). At 12:56 I was returning from transporting EldestOne to a remote bowling alley, still not thinking of the Moon landing (thinking more "will this giant truck crush me").

Still, I've had some time to reflect. In the 44 years since that boy watched the Moon walk transfixed by the flickering black and white image (bought to you by the Parkes radio telescope) a lot has changed. Only yesterday a large number of earthlings waved at a spacecraft around Saturn, and we have the images today.

Voyager 1 has almost left the solar system. New Horizons is almost at Pluto. We have landed spacecraft on Asteroids and blown a hole in a comet.

Opportunity has been roving Mars for longer than we sent humans to the Moon. And the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has sent back pictures of the abandoned landing stages on the Moon.

The Moon landing was not the first of humanities steps into space, nor will it be our last, but it was certainly the most dramatic, and etched itself forever into my mind. 44 years ago a boy couldn't sleep for the excitement of seeing humans on the Moon. Today, somewhere in the world other children are sleepless with excitement over what we are accomplishing today, that's a fine legacy for our Moon walkers.

Labels: history, Moon

The Sea of Tranquillity as photographed through my 4" Newtonian (with added lens dirt).

In honour of Neil Armstrong, who died yesterday at the age of 82, I got my family and our visiting hemi-demi relatives to wink at the Moon. Then I got my small telescope out and showed them Mare Tranquillitatis, the Sea of Tranquillity, where Neil made his epic step.

The I showed them the triangle of Mars, Saturn and Spica, then showed them Saturn and Mars through the telescope.

As a geek child I was obsessed with the missions to the Moon, we had a copy of National Geographic with a fold out of the Apollo instument panel, and I used to sit in frontof it pressing the pictures buttons and switches and imagining it was me going to the Moon.

I clearly remember the  moment when Neil stepped on the Moon, seen on our tiny, grainy black and white TV. Unfortunately, I can't remember anything before of after that section. Perhaps my memories have been suborned to the continual replay of that iconic image.

Regardless, Neil was one of my heroes, the first person to set foot on another world. And I will honour his memory by showing people the wonders of the sky and the strangely shaped patch on the Moons' face where humans once walked (and, of course, winking). 

If anybody wants to send me images of the Moon they took while winking at it, I will be pleased to post them.

Tranquility Base imaged on March 2012 by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (Image credit:LRO/NASA)

Another way you can honour Neil's memory is to help Map the Moon.

A series of interviews with Neil Armstrong, strangely with an Australian accountant, can be found here. 

A report on the ABC online news site is here.

6 memorable letters from Neil Armstrong are here.

The Bad Astronomers take is here.

And finally, this XKCD cartoon is very appropriate.

Labels: history, Moon, spacecraft

Labels: history, Moon, spacecraft

Correspondent John Kent has alerted me to the restoration of the Great Melbourne Telescope. This scope, once the second largest in the world, played an significant role in southern hemisphere astronomy, and next time I'm in Melbourne I'll head out to the observatory and look it up.

Labels: history, telescope

.. If he got it right. Yet in an article in The Australian today (Inquirer, Oct 29-30, page 18) Geoffrey Blainey is quoted as saying

"In 1970 the overwhelming majority of scientists believed that there was not going to be going to be global warming over the next 40 years..."

If he had bothered to do any research, rather than buying into denialist myths, he would have found that most research was pointing to warming, and that warming was a long-standing prediction of physics (see also this article).

Blainey goes on to say:

"The interesting thing to me about science is that it's given the benefit of of the doubt in ways that Christianity used to be given the benefit of the doubt."

Well, if it were true, that would because science has runs on the board in way that religion hasn't. From the eradication of small pox to landing people on the Moon, science has proved its credentials. Whenever you use your mobile phone, you are using the practical application of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. Religion ascribed epilepsy to demonic possession, a few Christian sects still do, with tragic consequences. But science is unravelling the causes of epilepsy and has developed effective treatments. So science has earned the benefit of doubt.

But in fact, science rarely is given the benefit of the doubt. From global warming, to tobacco and cancer, to acid rain, to heart transplants, to IVF, to the ozone hole, to collapse of fish stocks from overfishing politicians, entrenched interests and often religious leaders have fought tooth and nail against the scientific consensus, only relenting (sometimes) when scientists have been shown incontrovertibly, sometimes tragically, right. Between The Australians War on Science and members of the Catholic Church spreading misinformation on condoms and AIDS, it's obvious that science isn't being given the benefit of the doubt and is being actively opposed.

Blainey has written some wonderful history, his "Tyranny of Distance" was a seminal work of Australian history, it's a pity his comments on science are fantasy.

Labels: global warming sillyness, history, scepticism, science communicators

Portrait of Copernicus, 1580, Toruń Old Town City Hall Image Credit WikiPedia.

I have been a fan of Dava Sobel ever since I first read "Longitude", so I was excited to receive a copy of her latest book "A More Perfect Heaven". Ms Sobel has written quite a bit about the solar system and the social and scientific mileau that existed as we came to understand the our place amidst the myriad worlds, and this latest book extends that work.

In "Galileo's Daughter", we saw Galileo and the development of his work on heliocentrism through the eyes of his daughter, a cloistered nun. This time Ms Sobel looks at Copernicus, the developer of the heliocentric theory that Galileo championed (you can see an animated comparison of the theories here).

This work is a superb treatment of Copernicus the man, and the political and scientific climate that prevailed as he developed his work. You won't find out what exactly an equant is[1], or why it was so important that Copernicus banished it, or why perfect circular motion was an obsession with medieval astronomers[2], but the account of the man himself and the struggle to develop his theory in a time of upheaval is riveting.

Copernicus's heliocentric system, Image credit WikiPedia

For most people, if you have an image of Copernicus at all, it is as a cloistered monk bent over parchment. Ms Sobel introduces us to a person who is almost the antithesis of this image.

The Copernicus who frantically organised the defence of Allenstein in the face of a near invincible invading army, and yet still found the time to do astronomical observations, was no mere cloistered monk. Copernicus was a complicated man living in complicated times. Ms Sobel paints a compelling picture of him and those times, the intellectual ferment, the politics and duties that took Copernicus away from his astronomical work, and the circle of friends and confidants that commented on and encouraged his astronomy.

Despite encouragement, and entreaties, Copernicus had decided he would not publish his work on heliocentrism. Somehow, The mathematician Rheticus, a Protestant banned from the Catholic lands Copernicus lived in managed to make the dangerous overland journey to Copernicus's home, and managed to stay in the city he should have been expelled from for two years; long enough to convince Copernicus to publish and help him with organization and editing.

We have no knowledge of how this amazing feat was accomplished, in the absence of any historical record, Ms Sobel inserts a fictional interlude where she imagines, in play form, what might have happened. While it is an unusual construction in a work of non-fiction, I think it works, inviting the reader to more fully imagine the world of Copernicus.

After the interlude we return to history, and the frantic rush to the "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres" into press. Almost everyone with an interest in astronomy will know the story of how the completed manuscript copy of "On the Revolutions.." was pressed into the dying Copernicus hands, Ms Sobel fleshes out that story. Even in these days of electronic compositing and email, proof reading and correcting manuscripts is a painful process, just imagine what it was like when it took days to typeset, print and dry a page before sending the pages hundreds of laborious miles for someone to pore over them.

The reactions to "On the Revolutions...." are treated well (the Catholic Church was possibly the first to experience the Streisand Effect when it listed Copernicus's book in the index of proscribed books). Arthur Koesteler famously described "On the Revolutions" as the book nobody read. Now, I wouldn't trust Kosteler's description as far as I could spit a rat, and Ms Sobel does us a signal favour by introducing a new and wider audience to Owen Gingerich's work showing that in fact it was the book everyone read.

Copernicus's legacy was not just the heliocentric theory, although that was significant enough, but the approach of marrying careful and meticulous observation with detailed theory was the forerunner of the modern scientific method. The Gregorian calendar we use today depended on Copernicus's determination of the length of the mean solar year. Ms Sobel has produced a modern and compelling work which locates Copernicus and his work firmly in the history of the his time, yet makes him understandable in our time.

[1] you will find a brief but understandable explanation of the equant on page 20-21 of the hardcover edition of "A More Perfect Heaven", but the details and implications are not explored. Copernicus's removal of the equant was hailed by his contemporaries as a significant achievement, but you really need to understand the Aristotelian world view to see why this was.
[2] one of the reasons motion had to be uniform and circular in the Aristotelian universe, apart for the idea that circles were perfect, and reflected the perfection of the heavens and the creator, was that any deviation from perfect, circular motion would result in a vacuum, which was not permissible in the Aristotelian universe. See Zero, the Biography of a Dangerous Idea for a fascinating look at this.

Labels: history, review