A look back at coverage of ISON

I had to smile with the arrival of the January 2014 issues Astronomy and Sky & Telescope magazines earlier this month. The cover of the former heralded “Comet ISON’s Final Stab at Glory,” while the latter proclaimed “Comet ISON’s Final Act.” Richard Talcott’s article in Astronomy was subheaded “This cosmic visitor should remain a fine binocular object as it skims near the North Star during its retreat from the inner solar system.” Editor Robert Naeye’s piece in S&T proclaimed “Comet ISON might be putting on a gorgeous display as you read these words… or maybe not.”

Both magazines arrived in my mailbox about a week after ISON went “poof” after passing within 730,000 miles of the surface of the Sun on Thanksgiving Day.

The fact that both publications carried articles about something we already knew wasn’t going to happen by the time the issues arrived in our mailboxes serves to illustrate the challenge of monthly print magazines trying to cover breaking news. The approaches of the writers revealed a bit about the editorial bent of the magazines. I decided to take a look back at how they covered ISON over the past year.

Astronomy was the first of the first of the two
major magazines to write about ISON, and made the
comet its cover story in November 2013.

Even though ISON was discovered in late September of 2012, the first mention of it in print didn’t come until the December issue of Astronomy, in which senior editor Michael E. Bakich wrote, “About a year from now, Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) may well become the brightest comet anyone alive has ever seen. Just how bright it will get is currently a subject of debate.”

S&T didn’t mention ISON until January 2013, when the cover proclaimed “The Comets are Coming,” and contributing editor John E. Bortle, who has been writing about comets for the magazine since 1967, wrote “whether [ISON] will become a great comet remains unclear,” and he chided the “Internet wags” (guys like me) for their poor understanding of typical comet behavior and wild speculation and hype about ISON’s potential. That same month in Astronomy Bakich again used the “anyone alive” line, and channeled Spiro Agnew and William Safire when he noted in his article that “The nattering nabobs of negativism already are downplaying expectations. I, for one, am not drinking from their half-empty glass.” One wonders if he got an advance peek at Bortle’s copy.

There wasn’t much written about ISON for the next few months, though comets LINEAR and PanSTARRS got some coverage during the late winter and early spring. S&T stepped in with a little downward adjustment of expectations in April. Naeye wrote that predictions of ISON’s spectacular potential were premature.

“With our decades of experience covering such matters, we know better at S&T.” The issue also included an article looking back at the much-hyped Comet Kohoutek, the mid-1970s “dud of the century.” After that S&T would not spill one drop of ink on ISON until August.

Astronomy was more active in its coverage. In June David J. Eicher wrote about comets in his “From the Editor” column, using the “anyone alive” line from Bakich but also stressing how unpredictable comets can be. Eicher write about ISON and other comets in his column in six of the next eight issues, breaking only to note the magazine’s 40th anniversary and its website re-design. His “Snapshot” column at the head of each issue’s news section was about comets in four of those eight months.

There wasn’t much else in either of the magazines for the rest of the summer. Astronomy ran a monthly note in the Comet Search section of its observing guide each month beginning in July, and S&T added ISON notes to its observing section starting in August.

Sky & Telescope put ISON on
 its cover in December 2013.

The pace picked up a bit in September. Bortle wrote in S&T that “Some have been billing ISON as ‘the comet of the century.’ Is there a chance this won’t be an embarrassment?” Richard Talcott’s article in Astronomy that month also used a question mark on “comet of the century,” though the subhead noted ISON was “still two months from glory.”

In October S&T was dead silent on ISON, while Astronomy kicked it into gear. Talcott wrote a four-page article about viewing ISON during its approach, and Joseph Marcus wrote six heavily illustrated pages about “What Makes a Great Comet?”

Sky & Telescope showed more enthusiasm in November. Naeye wrote about ISON but continued to warn “Anybody who tries to give you definitive brightness predictions months in advance is either playing the hype game or doesn’t understand the unpredictable nature of comets.” The magazine also ran an eight-page article about great comets, written by Joe Rao, and some detailed observing charts and instructions. Astronomy went all-in, with a November cover story—"Comet ISON Blazes Into Glory”—and other features on the science of comets, superstition about comets, the anatomy of a comet, and a history of bright comets.

December was the month in which having to write about the news before it happened really became a pinch. Talcott’s story in Astronomy carried the sub-head “After a harrowing pass by the Sun late last month, this cosmic interloper should remain a grand sight throughout these long December nights.” S&T made ISON its December cover story, with articles by Bortle, who kept with his story line about the unpredictability of the matter, and others writing about comet science, viewing guides, and tips for taking images of comets. Both magazines had photo contests up and going.

Finally, January and the let-down. We learned just after Thanksgiving that ISON had disintegrated while skimming the Sun, before our January magazines hit the mailbox the first week of December. The final act was over before the curtain even came up.

The different approaches the two publications took to their ISON coverage are interesting. In one sense Sky & Telescope was “right.” It warned from the start that comets are unpredictable and that we shouldn’t get our hopes up too much. Astronomy made that warning, too, though it generally took a more hopeful approach and devoted far more space to ISON than did S&T, using the opportunity to write more about comets in general.

By this time you may be asking how Seattle Astronomy covered ISON. The answer is that we didn’t, making just one mention in a post back in May about the possibility of using ISON as a way to get people interested in astronomy. We passed along breaking ISON news and speculation on Facebook and Twitter.

The saving grace for the monthly magazines is that they, too can use their websites and social media to cover breaking news that is impossible to catch in print versions that go to press more than a month ahead of their mail dates. They have to write something, but it’s a particular challenge to deal with such unpredictable critters as comets.

Some amateur observers got a peek at ISON, and scientists made many observations and learned a lot more about comets, so in that sense it wasn’t a “dud.” But unfortunately ISON didn’t come close to becoming the spectacle we’d hoped for when its sungrazing nature was first recognized more than a year ago. We’re still waiting for the comet of the century.

SohCahToa and finding the angle of the Sun in the sky

In Friday’s post about the approach of the solstice I cheated and just looked up the Sun’s noontime altitude using Starry Night software. But the math geek in me decided to try to dredge up my high school trigonometry nearly 40 years since studying it. I’m happy to say that I’ve still got it!

I think that the only reason I remember SohCahToa is that we had a bunch of weisenheimers in our trig class, myself included, and we came up with a report called “SohCahToa East of Java,” a joke that required that you know your geological history and late-1960s disaster movies. SohCahToh is the standard mnemonic for remembering which values to use to figure sine, cosine, and tangent.

In our problem, we’re trying to figure the angle A, that of the Sun up in the sky, given that it’s above and behind a six-foot fence casting a 14-foot shadow. Since we know the length of the opposite side, the fence, and of the adjacent side, the shadow, SohCahToa says we use tangent: Tangent=opposite/adjacent. The inverse tangent gives you the angle, in this case 23.2 degrees. (Did you know that your iPhone has a trig calculator? I didn’t until I accidentally turned mine to landscape orientation when I was calculating something much simpler a few months back. So now you can figure triangle angles and trig functions wherever you go.)

Starry Night gave the Sun’s actual altitude that day as about 19.6 degrees. The difference can be attributed to the fact that the fence is a touch shorter than six feet, and the deck is raised off the ground a few inches, making the “opposite” side even a bit shorter. Close enough, though; I was out there in my jammies with a tape-measure, and it was about 20 degrees, so I was only taking approximate measurements!

But there you go. I even showed my work. SohCahToa!

A sign the Solstice is nigh

Even casual sky watchers must be noticing that the Sun is staying low in the sky all day, and that it is rising and setting way in the south. I looked down this morning and spotted a sign that the Winter Solstice is approaching in just over two weeks.

A large area of my back yard gets no direct
light from the Sun because it is so low in the
sky as the Solstice approaches.

An area of permafrost has formed on my deck, leftover from Monday’s blizzard that dumped nearly 1/32″ of snow in Seattle. Most of the ice is gone, except for an area in the shadow of the fence, an area that isn’t getting any direct sunlight this time of year.

Here’s where your high school geometry comes into play. The south fence is about six feet tall, and yet the shadow it is casting stretches for about 14 feet to the edge of the unmelted, unevaporated ice. A few calculations reveal that the Sun is getting less than 20 degrees above our local horizon to cast a shadow that long.

OK, I admit I just looked that up in my planetarium software, but if I remembered all of those triangle formulae I could have figured it out! Suffice to say the Sun is low in the sky, and winter is upon us.

This is one of many reasons that tomato plants prefer summer to winter. The garden bed in which our tomatoes were planted this year lies entirely inside this shadow area and is getting no Sun at all. This being Seattle, it doesn’t get so much Sun in the summer, either, but that’s another story.

You can use your astronomical knowledge anywhere! What signs have you spotted that the solstice is approaching?

Scanning atmospheres for signs of extraterrestrial life

Giada Arney thinks that life likely exists somewhere besides Earth. Arney, a third-year Ph.D. student in astronomy and astrobiology at the University of Washington, gave a talk at November’s meeting of the Seattle Astronomical Society about the search for the origins of life in the universe.

“Some of us like me who are astrobiologists think it’s likely that life has arisen elsewhere in the cosmos and perhaps elsewhere in our own solar system,” Arney said. “But so far the only evidence we have for life that actually exists is on this singular planet.”

Ph.D. candidate Giada Arney is planetarium coordinator at
the University of Washington, and used the facility, refurbished
a couple of years ago, to illustrate her talk about astrobiology.
This shot of Earth was part of the talk. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

It’s hard to extrapolate from a single data point, but Arney is on the case. The educated guess that there’s some form of life out there stems from the fact that the raw materials are all over the place. Asteroids, for example, are loaded with water and carbon molecules—and much more.

“We’ve looked at the composition of various types of very carbon-rich asteroids, and we’ve looked at the specific types of carbon molecules that exist in those asteroids,” Arney said. “We found sugars, we found amino acids—the building blocks of proteins in our cells. We found nucleic acids, the building blocks of our DNA.”

“What this suggests is that these building blocks of life are easy for nature to synthesize and they’re cosmically common,” she said.

On top of that, Arney said study of the interstellar medium reveals lots of sugars and alcohols. This had me thinking, “Well, what else do you need?!” Arney said that the significance of these is that they’re the building blocks for amino acids. Astrobiologists have yet to pinpoint amino acids in the interstellar medium—it’s exceedingly difficult to pick out their spectral fingerprints—but Arney bets they’re there.

“This suggests that this complex carbon chemistry, that at least life on Earth requires, is cosmically abundant,” she concluded.

Arney’s research bailiwick is planetary atmospheres, and that’s where astrobiologists are going to look for evidence of life on other planets. There are plenty of potential places to investigate. Arney said that around eight percent of low-mass stars have an Earth-size planet in their habitable zones. She said a recent analysis of Kepler data that put this figure at close to 20 percent came in too high because of what she feels is an overly generous definition of the zone. Even eight percent, though, gives scientists a lot of planets to explore. The ultimate test will involve direct imaging and spectroscopy of the exoplanets’ atmospheres, something we can’t really do yet.

“Once direct-imaging missions become possible, we’re going to look for gases like water vapor and oxygen in the atmospheres of exoplanets,” Arney said. “Maybe that will give us evidence for life on these planets.”

The effort will require use of another rare element: cash.

“It will be a very expensive mission because it’s going to require a very big telescope,” she said, bigger even than Hubble or Webb. “You need to collect a lot of photons in order to measure the spectra of an exoplanet to have a high enough signal-to-noise ratio to be able to confidently say, ‘Hey, there’s oxygen in this planet’s atmosphere.'”

Arney expects life is out there.

“Microbial life is probably common, but the general consensus in the astrobiology community is that complex life and certainly intelligent life is probably remarkably rare,” she concluded.

The search continues.

Hadfield talks guitars and other space oddities

Chris Hadfield may not be quite the household name among astronauts that John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, or Buzz Aldrin are, but he tops them all in at least one category: Hadfield’s video version of the David Bowie tune “Space Oddity,” recorded on the International Space Station, has been viewed more than 19 million times on YouTube. That’s by far the most hits among his many made-from-space flicks and eclipses on-line hits on Moon-landing videos.

Hadfield made a stop in Seattle earlier this month for a talk before a large crowd at Town Hall Seattle, where he signed copies of his book An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything.

Though YouTube didn’t exist during the Apollo era, Hadfield said he was nonetheless inspired by the space pioneers.

“I decided to be an astronaut when I was nine; that’s when Neil and Buzz walked on the Moon,” he said. This was especially challenging for a kid from Canada. “It wasn’t just hard, it was impossible. There was no Canadian astronaut program.”

He pursued the dream anyway, learning to fly airplanes as a teen, and picking up astronaut-type skills the best he could until, finally, the opportunity presented itself.

Astronaut Chris Hadfield spoke Nov. 12 at
Town Hall Seattle. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Hadfield didn’t talk much about the book during his Seattle event, mostly limiting prepared remarks to an account of what it’s like to be launched into space. He said the first nine minutes bring the majority of the risk on any mission.

“You have seven million pounds of thrust and you are going… somewhere!” he said. “It feels like something crashed into your spaceship. There’s this big pulse of energy through the whole ship and then a big rumbling vibration. You can’t hear it, but oh, you can feel it, like a piston in the small of your back that pushes harder and harder.”

He said that on his first space flight he experienced an unexpected injury by the time they reached orbit.

“About this time I noticed my face hurt; my cheeks were all cramped up and I realized that I’d been smiling so broadly,” Hadfield recalled.

“I laughed at myself to think that I didn’t know how much fun I was having. Part of me was going ‘OK check the pressures, check this, call out the distances, all the ranges, black zones, all the rest of it,’ and part of me was going ‘WHEEEEEE!'”

Hadfield said that playing guitar in space is an interesting experience because of weightlessness.

“When you fret with your hands, the whole guitar just takes off!” he said. “Eventually you learn how to stabilize it.”

In addition, he said that playing with a weightless arm throws you off.

“When you try to do something quick up and down the neck you miss,” Hadfield explained. “You have to re-learn how to fret properly.”

There’s a West Coast connection to Hadfield’s space musicianship. He has a special guitar made by Roscoe Wright of Wright Guitars in Eugene, Oregon.

“He makes this really weird guitar that is just the fret board,” Hadfield said. “The guitar pieces are actually like a coat hanger, so that it gives the shape of a guitar, it feels like a guitar against your body, but it folds up really tiny, a really clever design. I got him to cut the neck in half so it would fit into a shuttle locker. He built one special for me.”

It’s not the guitar used in the “Space Oddity” video, which is an ordinary acoustic instrument.

Hadfield also fielded questions about the past and the future of space exploration. He, like most astronauts I’ve heard speak, thinks that shutting down the space shuttle program was the right call, noting that shuttles flew for the better part of three decades.

“You probably don’t drive a 30 year old car to work every day, you sure don’t drive one to space every day,” Hadfield said.

“There’s only so much money in the NASA budget, and you can’t fly an expensive vehicle while building a new vehicle unless you get a big whack of money from somebody else, and there was no somebody else,” he explained. “I think we did it just right.”

“Everybody should celebrate the space shuttle,” he added. “It was the most capable vehicle we’ve ever built and it served us superbly. I was delighted to get a chance to fly it.”

As for the future, Hadfield feels the next logical step in humanity’s continuing drive to explore will be an international effort to return to the Moon.

“We need to learn how to go live there,” he said. “We will learn an awful lot by setting up permanent habitation on the Moon over the next–who knows? 30 years, couple generations. From there hopefully we’ll invent enough things that we can go even further.”

Amateur astronomers ID mysterious bright object in COS skies

“When in doubt, call an amateur.”

This may not be good advice for neurosurgery or airline piloting, but it was just the ticket for identifying a mysterious, bright object in the early evening skies over Colorado Springs. While visiting family in Springs they shared with me an article in Saturday’s Colorado Springs Gazette, prompted by an email from a reader who had spotted said object for several days running and urged the paper to investigate, insisting adamantly that “it is not the planet Venus.”

Reporter Tom Roeder consulted local Navy and Air Force experts on flying things as well as an astronomer from the University of Colorado. Two of the three figured it was Venus, but demurred from making definitive statements to that effect because identifying strange, bright objects isn’t necessarily squarely within their bailiwicks.

As people who know them recognize, amateur astronomers have no such reservations. Roeder called Alan Gorski of the Colorado Springs Astronomical Society, who, after a little double checking, confirmed that the bright light is Venus, despite the assessment by the Gazette reader.

When my mother-in-law mentioned the article I, too, immediately concluded it is Venus. Readers occasionally write Seattle Astronomy with what-is-it questions, and it’s almost always either Venus or Jupiter. The King of Planets is also up in the evening these days, rising in the eastern sky a bit before 8:30 p.m. It was a nice sight shining in mostly clear skies last night.

Colorado Springs has some good potential for stargazing, as it is at just over 6,000 feet in elevation and has some pretty clear horizons, especially to the east. But alas, with a population of more than 430,000 the light pollution in the city, while not quite so bad as our home base in West Seattle, is pretty robust. The Colorado Springs Astronomical Society owns a dark-sky observing site near the town of Gardner, Colorado, a little over 100 miles south of The Springs and closest to the city of Walsenberg. The site is home to the annual Rocky Mountain Star Stare.

The Bearscove star party intensity scale

Astronomy clubs often hold star parties, but seasoned attendees and newcomers alike have varied expectations for such events. Jon Bearscove says that’s no wonder. He identified five different types of star party during a talk at October’s meeting of the Seattle Astronomical Society, and also suggested a common rating system so those planning to attend a star party will know what to expect.

Public astronomical observing goes back at least to Great Britain’s King George III, whom Bearscove, founder of the Galileo Astronomy Unclub, described as “a star party guy.” The definition of star party is simple: A gathering of amateur astronomers for the purpose of observing the sky. But star parties can come in a lot of different formats.

Bearscove is something of a star-party commando and knows whereof he speaks. Here are his five types:

1. Outreach
2. Observing
3. Mixed
4. Publicity
5. Literal

Outreach is a common type of star party. Most astronomy clubs hold regular events to share members’ love of the night sky with others, and this is a primary mission for many. Clubs may set up a star party in a public park or even a supermarket parking lot and invite anyone who happens by to take a look through their telescopes. Outreach star parties also may be given for school groups, scout troops, or specific communities. Outreach events are highly social and are all about sharing.

Observing star parties are on the opposite end of the spectrum. These are more serious affairs for the hardcore, experienced amateur who is doing research, study, or photography. They are often held at remote locations with much darker skies. While a number of amateur astronomers may be in the same place at the same time, nobody wants to be disturbed.

President Obama’s White House Astronomy
Night from 2009 qualifies as a Publicity Star
Party. Jon Bearscove says you can’t do much
real observing with TV lights on in one of the
most light-polluted cities in the U.S.
Photo: White House.

Mixed star parties are a blending of the outreach and observing types. The annual Table Mountain Star Party is an example. It’s a highly social event at which people check out everyone else’s cool astronomy gear, but there are some serious observers who attend as well. Usually those who want to be left alone can make it known. Respect those who are doing serious work; bump into someone’s telescope and you might foul up a six-hour photographic exposure.

Publicity is a new category of star party on Bearscove’s list. He describes it as an event with “no purpose” and came up with the notion when he saw photos of an Astronomy Night event held at the White House in 2009.

“If there are bright lights, media coverage, and the Secret Service, it’s a different kind of star party,” he quipped.

Literal star parties are, well, exactly that.

“Star means shiny thing in the sky; party means light, music, booze,” Bearscove said as he explained the category. His example: he once traveled to Japan for the annual Tainai Star Party, often described as the biggest in the world. Bearscove described it as more of a rock concert, with bands, bright lights, vendors, 20,000 people, and “zero observing.”

Bearscove, the shadowy figure at the bottom of the frame,
 explained his Star Party Intensity Scale at October’s
meeting of the Seattle Astronomical Society.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Bearscove suggests a shorthand way of referring to star parties, inspired by the hurricane intensity scale. His three-step scale loosely corresponds to the observing, mixed, and outreach types of star parties. On the Bearscove Scale a “Category 1” star party would feature extensive observing, “Category 2” would have moderate intensity, and “Category 3” would be the lowest intensity, focused on outreach.

“I think it would be neat if there could be a standard scale,” Bearscove said. “You might have people more interested in a category 2 or a category 1. Everyone’s different.”

His advice for navigating those differences: “Match star parties to your taste,” he suggested. “I like outreach a lot but I also like hard-core observing.” He crosses categories.

It will be interesting to see if the Bearscove scale catches on!

Preserving history at UW observatory

The semimonthly open houses at the Theodor Jacobsen Observatory at the University of Washington are over for the year. When they resume again in the spring the observatory may include a little more local history. The UW Astronomy Department has recently regained jurisdiction over the one-time office of the late professor after whom the facility is named, and is looking to spruce up the room with historical artifacts and interactive exhibits.

The long-time UW astronomy professor’s name
is still on the door of his former office in the
namesake Theodor Jacobsen Observatory. Efforts
 are under way to make the office a historical exhibit.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

While Jacobsen’s name remains painted on the door of the office, it had for a number of years been used as a check-in space for custodians university-wide. Occasional efforts over the years to return the office to historical astronomical uses came to naught, according to Dr. Ana Larson, UW lecturer and Jacobsen Observatory director who heads up the public outreach program at the observatory. Recently, Larson said, custodians scored space in the new Paccar Hall nearby and observatory buffs swooped in to return the Jacobsen office to astronomical uses.

With the space in hand, the big stumbling block for turning it into an historical exhibit is cash. Larson figures the budget for the project is at about -$200; she recently purchased an old oak desk for $70 out-of-pocket and installed it in the office. It is certainly not Jacobsen’s desk, but fits with the period. A mini-exhibit is already up in the office, including an old briefcase of Jacobsen’s, a star-atlas notebook, and an armillary on the desk.

A small exhibit with a few artifacts of
Theodor Jacobsen is already up in the late
professor’s former office. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

It seems most fitting to set up a tribute to Jacobsen. For nearly four decades he was the only professor in the UW astronomy department, which he served from 1928 until his retirement in 1971. Retirement didn’t mean that Jacobsen quit working. He published his final book just a few years before his death in 2003 at age 102.

The observatory already is listed on the state register of historical buildings. It is the second oldest structure on the UW campus, and was built in 1895 with sandstone blocks left over from the construction of Denny Hall. The observatory’s six-inch Warner and Swasey telescope with Brashear objective, built around 1892, is still functional, having been restored in the late 1990s by members of the Seattle Astronomical Society, volunteers from which still operate the scope on open house nights. Light pollution and the large trees that have grown up around the observatory limit the scope’s use somewhat, but it is an effective outreach tool; the open houses at the observatory, featuring observing when weather permits and talks by astronomy students, have proven to be popular.

The office project has a modest price tag. Larson figures as little as $1,500 would get them going with some decent display cases, other furniture, posters, and interactive exhibits. She plans to pitch the university for funds, but budgets are tight. She may also consider some sort of crowdfunding effort. If you would like to donate to help with the project, visit the Jacobsen Observatory website to find out how.

Samammish astronomer uses video to share the WOW factor

A little girl’s interest in outer space gave Samammish, Wash. amateur astronomer Ted Cook a golden opportunity to combine three of his favorite things: his passion for education, his love for astronomy, and his profession as a photographer and video producer.

When his niece developed an interest in space at a young age, Cook’s sister looked around for educational materials suitable for a youngster. She didn’t find much. Her plan B: “Ask Uncle Ted.”

“I thought if nothing is out there, maybe I can start to put together some stuff and put it out there for kids,” Cook recalled.

He had a bit of a head start. A history buff, Cook already had created a series of videos about Washington state history, animated episodes in which characters Herc, Velocity, and their dog Laika visited people and places from the state’s past.

“I had these characters created, and I had this whole setup, and I thought how about if we move to what I really love, which is astronomy,” Cook said.

Between 2006 and 2008 Ted Cook Productions created three astronomy DVDs, which were sold at museums and planetariums around the country. These three, along with his four state-history disks, are still available for sale on his website. Because of the challenges of producing and distributing physical disks, and the growth of YouTube and other services, he decided to put new astronomy videos online. In addition, this year Cook embarked on an ambitious plan of producing four educational pieces every month, under the banner of “Let’s Explore Astronomy.” Three of them will be videos: one about astronomy history, one about the how-to’s of the hobby, and one about what can be seen in the night sky in that particular month. A fourth piece will be a written recap of astronomy news for the previous month. He’s done about five of each so far.

This month, for example, Cook’s “Andromeda Time-Slip Theater” is taking a look at Mars: Herc and Velocity listen to part of the famed Orson Welles radio drama about a Martian invasion.

“They’re talking about Percival Lowell and the canals, and ‘The War of the Worlds,’ and then what the rovers found,” Cook said. “We look at how we moved from Percival Lowell thinking he’d found canals on Mars to finding there was once water there.” Take a look:


Cook said he aims to make the videos accessible for kids in about 5th or 6th grade, but wants adults to be able to get something out of them, too.

“I wanted to make it so that someone who is just getting into astronomy or wants to know more about it can learn without it being total mathematics,” Cook explained.

Cook hopes to keep the videos free, and is offering them to astronomy clubs around the country to use in their outreach efforts. He’s considering creating accompanying curriculum and hands-on activities that could be used in classrooms or for any youngster who wants to learn more about space. He’s already developed a game that he uses for outreach events with younger kids, in which they can learn about order of the planets and some facts about each one.

Making it a paying enterprise may take some doing. Cook has a couple of sponsors for the videos and may pursue grant funding or other ways to help offset the costs of creating the programs.

It was almost inevitable that Cook would be interested in space.

“My dad worked at the Kennedy Space Center during the Apollo days, so that was my playground when I was a kid,” he said. “I was inspired because I was there. I saw it every day.”

“I was hooked, I knew all of the astronauts’ names,” Cook added.

Cook actually is a rocket scientist; he earned a degree in aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech, but later studied photography at UCLA. He’s been in that business as a shooter and a teacher for some 30 years. But he still maintains a sense of wonder and awe when talking about astronomy and space.

“It is the new frontier, it has the wow factor,” Cook said as he explained his passion for outreach and getting others interested in the hobby, or perhaps in astronomy as a career. “You’re looking at these things going WOW! That’s cool! I think that has a lot to do with it. The people respond because of the wow factor.”

There’s a lovely completed circle in this story. Cook’s niece Delenn Larsen, the little girl who launched him on this trajectory, is now 13 years old and remains interested in space and astronomy. In fact, she is the voice of the character Velocity in the videos!

In addition to educational videos, Ted Cook Productions also offers astronomy tours of New Mexico, a venture on which Cook is teamed with Dr. Alan Hale, the co-discoverer of Comet Hale-Bopp.

You can check out Cook’s videos on YouTube or on the Ted Cook Productions website. Spread the word to the young space nuts in your universe.

All systems go for Bainbridge sundial project

A sundial project that the Battle Point Astronomical Association (BPAA) has had on the drawing board for years will become reality by summer if all goes as planned. A fundraising effort anchored by an Indiegogo campaign has been a success.

“We’re only about $150 short of where we need to be, so on the strength of that we’re moving ahead,” said Frank Petrie, a BPAA member who is heading up the sundial effort. “It’s a done deal.”

BPAA members, with artist Bill Baran-Mickle at the center,
pose with a model of the proposed sundial. BPAA photo.

Interestingly, the Indiegogo campaign fell well short of its goal, raising just $6,610 of the $17,000 needed to meet the project budget of about $30,000. Petrie said, however, that the campaign helped raise the overall visibility of the sundial project.

“A lot of donations came in outside of Indiegogo,” he said. “Even though we fell well short of our Indiegogo goal, all of this other money coming in outside of Indiegogo was able to bring us to the point where we successfully funded the project.”

The North American Sundial Society chipped in with a grant of $1,000 and several other significant private donations also were made.

“It was really gratifying to see how people stepped up and really got enthusiastic about the project and supported it,” Petrie said.

He gave a big nod to University of Washington astronomy professor Woody Sullivan, known in some circles as “Mr. Sundial.” Sullivan appeared in the video supporting the sundial campaign and also connected BPAA with the Sundial Society.

Bainbridge Island sculptor and metalsmith Bill Baran-Mickle is finalizing the design for the equatorial bowstring sundial, which will stand 12 feet tall. Petrie said the next steps are some engineering for the foundation for the sundial, which will be erected in Battle Point Park near BPAA’s Edwin Ritchie Observatory, then building the foundation, fabricating the sundial, and installing it.

“We hope to complete all that process by late spring, so hopefully we can have a dedication in late spring or early summer,” Petrie said.

Petrie added that additional contributions would be welcome. There’s a long-term plan to build a plaza at the sundial site, but that if enough donations are made in the coming months they could speed up the time line on that. Contributions can be made by check or online at the BPAA website. Earmark any contributions for the sundial project.

Petrie admitted that the original goal was pretty ambitious.

“It was a little daunting, but I’ve been really gratified. The Bainbridge Island community is good that way. They get excited about stuff like this,” Petrie said, adding that it wasn’t just islanders. “The response has been pretty overwhelming from all over. That’s been really nice.”

We look forward to attending the dedication of the sundial next summer if all goes as planned.

The End of Night

Paul Bogard laments the loss of the beauty of the stars and the night sky.

“Walking out of your door and seeing the Milky Way for ever was one of the most common human experiences, and now it’s become one of the most rare human experiences,” said Bogard, author of The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light. “Estimates are now that eight of 10 kids born in the United States will never live where they can see the Milky Way” because of light pollution.

“There’s been a real switch and, I think, with great cost,” Bogard said during a talk this week at Town Hall Seattle.

Author Paul Bogard spoke about The End of
Night at Town Hall Seattle on Oct. 8, 2013.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Bogard, an English professor at James Madison University, first got interested in the stars as a kid. He grew up in Minneapolis and his family had a lake cabin in Northern Minnesota, where he spent summer nights looking up.

“Year after year of seeing that night sky in the summer made a lasting impact on me,” he said.

Even more impressive was a post-college backpacking trip in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, where he described a night sky so dark it was like a dream; the millions of stars looked like a snowstorm.

“I felt open to everything, as though I was made of clay and the world was imprinting upon me its breathtaking beauty,” Bogard read from the book. “Standing nearly naked under that Moroccan sky, skin against the air, the dark, the stars, the night pressed its impression and my life-long connection was sealed.”

Much of The End of Night relates Bogard’s experiences visiting the brightest and the darkest places we can get to, sometimes within hours of each other, such as the time he drove from the bright lights of Las Vegas to the pitch dark of Great Basin National Park in Eastern Nevada.

During the talk Bogard shared the familiar photo of the Earth at night, and observed that it’s a beautiful image, but that he doesn’t like what it depicts.

“What we’re seeing here is waste,” he said. “Nearly all of the light we see here is shining up in to the sky, it’s wasted, it’s not doing anybody any good.”

While the loss of the splendor of the night sky is terrible, Bogard noted that the other effects of light pollution may be more compelling reasons to do something, from a public policy standpoint. Poor lighting can actually reduce safety and security, and it harms wildlife. He also said there’s growing evidence of light pollution’s health effects on humans. Our sleep is disrupted and our circadian rhythms confused, and bright nights impede our production of melatonin, which could lead to breast and prostate cancer. In fact, Bogard noted that the World Health Organization now considers working the night shift to be a possible carcinogen.

He praised the work of the International Dark-sky Association; the chair of its local chapter, David Ingram, was part of the audience at the talk. Bogard hopes The End of Night inspires a better approach to night lighting.

“What I was trying to do with the book is to raise awareness about the issue,” he said. “Once people become aware of the beauty that we’re talking about, what we’re losing, the threats of light pollution, I think most people will realize that we can do a better job of lighting the night or leaving some of it dark.”

Bainbridge sundial project in home stretch

The shadow is moving on the Battle Point Astronomical Association (BPAA) as it seeks to raise the funds needed to build a large equatorial bowstring sundial near its Edwin Ritchie Observatory in Battle Point Park on Bainbridge Island. With a week left in the association’s Indiegogo campaign, they’ve raised $4,535 toward the goal of $17,000 needed to fully fund the project.

BPAA members, with artist Bill Baran-Mickle at the center,
pose with a model of the proposed sundial. BPAA photo.

BPAA is actually a bit closer to the target than that. Frank Petrie, a BPAA member and part of the sundial committee, says they’ve raised more than $3,000 outside of Indiegogo since they launched the campaign about a month ago. Positive coverage of the effort has no doubt helped; in addition to our Seattle Astronomy article, the sundial project has received notice from the Bainbridge Island Review and Kitsap Sun. A contribution of $1,000 came in from the North American Sundial Society, which features a story about the BPAA effort on its website.

The budget for the sundial is $30,000. With previously received donations and contributions that have come in during the Indiegogo campaign, Petrie says they’re now within $10,000 of making the sundial a reality.

Even if they don’t reach the Indiegogo goal, they’ll receive funds pledged (less Indiegogo’s cut), and Petrie says they’ll bank that and take on other fundraising efforts until they have enough.

Why not resolve that worry and help them out today? Visit the campaign site, watch their video, read about the project and excellent perks for donors, and contribute to this worthy project. The sundial will be a significant piece of public art that will be a conversation starter, and it may well help spark some interest in astronomy.

Bainbridge astronomers seek funding for sundial

The Battle Point Astronomical Association (BPAA) has been working for many years on a plan to build a sundial next to its Edwin Ritchie Observatory in Battle Point Park on Bainbridge Island.

“It has been in the master plan for the organization almost since the get-go,” says Frank Petrie, a BPAA member since 1996 who is part of the sundial committee. The sundial would be built on a berm north of the association’s observatory and would be visible throughout much of the busy park.

BPAA members, with artist Bill Baran-Mickle at the center,
pose with a model of the proposed sundial. BPAA photo.

The project took a major leap toward reality with the launching of an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign earlier this month. Petrie says the aim of the campaign is to raise the $17,000 they need to fully fund the sundial.

The budget for the spectacular, 12-foot-tall, bronze-clad steel equatorial bowstring sundial, designed by Bainbridge metalsmith Bill Baran-Mickle, is $30,000. BPAA has collected about $13,000 toward the project over the years from the donation jar at their monthly planetarium shows and community events, a pledge from its board, and recent grants from the Bainbridge Island Metro Park and Recreation District and the Bainbridge Community Foundation. The latter, Petrie says, indicated to BPAA that there was widespread community interest in the sundial.

“There’s interest in this project coming from the arts community as well,” he says, because of the renown of Baran-Mickle and the desire for more public art at Battle Point.

Woody Sullivan, a University of Washington astronomy professor also known as “Mr. Sundial,” makes a pitch for the project in the BPAA’s video on Indiegogo.

“Sundials connect you with the cosmos,” Sullivan says in the video. “They connect you with a more natural kind of time than a digital, flashing watch. They tend to slow you down, also, which is something I think we need in our 21st Century iPhone existence.”

Petrie says the sundial is a first step in BPAA’s ambitious vision for its astronomy programs at Battle Point Park.

“Our hope is to build an astronomy-related complex around our observatory in Battle Point Park,” he explains. “We have a number of features that we’d like to incorporate, and the sundial is one of those features.”

Another is an adjacent building for BPAA’s planetarium. Monthly planetarium shows are presently wedged into the Helix House, which also houses the observatory. But the space is small and cramped, and typically far more interested people show up than can be accommodated, forcing many to wait for a second show, or miss out.

“It’s been very, very popular, and that tells us that our long-term plan to expand is a good one,” Petrie says.

The popularity is well-deserved; BPAA puts on a good show. Seattle Astronomy recommends them highly.

Petrie calls the BPAA and its facilities “a little jewel” and says he loves the organization’s commitment to its mission.

“It’s dedicated to public outreach and getting folks interested in science,” he says. “We like to share the excitement that we have about science in general and astronomy in particular, and hope that we can reach as many folks as possible and get them excited as well.”

You can help share the excitement by contributing to BPAA’s Indiegogo campaign for the sundial.

Earthlings on Mars

If scientists eventually discover strange new life forms on Mars, then Bernie Bates is going to be out about $4 to members of the Tacoma Astronomical Society. Bates, professor of astronomy at the University of Puget Sound, made a friendly wager with those who attended his talk at the club’s meeting earlier this month. He has a shiny new dime that says we will find life on Mars and that it will look awfully familiar.

Bates expects we will have a definitive resolution to the wager by around 2026. NASA recently announced a Mars mission for 2020, and the ESA and Russia are working on a slightly earlier mission, both with an eye toward eventually returning samples of Mars rock and soil for analysis.

Bernie Bates, astronomy instructor at the University of Puget
Sound, spoke about Mars exploration at the August meeting
 of the Tacoma Astronomical Society

“They’re going to get samples back, they’re going to find microbes in it, and they’re going to pull the microbes apart,” Bates says. “The microbes are going to have DNA that we recognize, nucleotides that we recognize.”

“Life will be there on Mars,” Bates bets, “and it will be Earth life.”

The reason: Earth and Mars have been exchanging rocks for billions of years. “Mars is so close to us that there’s been cross-contamination between the two planets.”

Bates is confident he won’t have to pay off on the 10-cent wager about this multi-billion dollar question. But he isn’t offering odds or compound interest!

Recent science has been pretty conclusive about the past habitability of Mars, according to Bates, though Mars hasn’t been very Earth-like for the last two or three billion years.

“All of the geology questions in a sense have been answered,” he says. “We’ve got every potential smoking gun you can ask for for life on Mars.”

He expects we will find it.

“If Mars had life on it then it’s still there, someplace, probably underground,” Bates says, noting that microbial life is tough and adaptable. “The planet itself never did anything so hostile so quickly that it could wipe it out.”

Exploration of Mars was bumped up a notch or two with the arrival there of Curiosity a year ago, Bates says. A big reason is its power source, a radioisotope thermoelectric generator that will keep the rover operable for many years.

“They know they have enough time to do the science, they don’t have to rush, they can actually think through what they’re doing,” Bates says.

Time means flexibility. Bates notes that Curiosity spent the better part of its first year on an unplanned detour to explore the geology of an area named Glenelg near its Martian landing site.

“The spacecraft has an almost unlimited lifetime, they trust it, and they can do something like that” without jeopardizing the primary mission, Bates says.

Finding life on another planet, even if it actually originated here on Earth, wouldn’t exactly be ho-hum. Bates believes, though, that the greater discovery will come from a bit further out than Mars.

“If you want to find what the real search is for in the solar system, what they call second genesis, a different type of life, the Jovian people are the people to put your money on,” Bates says.

Money is a key factor. Interplanetary exploration costs a lot, and there’s not much cash to go around. The bulk of it is being invested in Mars these days, but Bates and many astrobiologists are rooting for more funding for those who want to probe the systems of Jupiter or Saturn. Both gas giant planets have moons that have interesting possibilities for life.

“Europa, Enceladus, that’s where the answers are,” Bates says.

The eyes of Mars visit Queen Anne

Melissa Rice has a sweet gig.

Dr. Melissa Rice of Caltech spoke about the Mars Rovers at a
Queen Anne Science Café event in July. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

“I actually get paid to sit around and look at pictures of Mars all day,” said Rice, an Eastside native, during a Science Café talk at T.S. McHugh’s earlier this month. Dr. Rice, who works for the Division of Geological & Planetary Sciences at CalTech, is a science team collaborator on the Curiosity Mars science laboratory mission, and also worked on the Spirit and Opportunity rover missions. She was back in Seattle for a special July Science Café event, sponsored by the Pacific Science Center, KCTS-9 television, and the Planetary Society. Rice gave a talk titled “Through the ‘Eyes’ of NASA’s Mars Rovers.”

It was a good homecoming for Rice who, like Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye “The Science Guy”, got her start at the Pacific Science Center.

“As a kid I came many, many times and loved it, and that’s where the seeds were planted that led me here working on these Mars missions today,” Rice said. “I feel really honored to be back here, paying it forward, planting some seeds for some of the next generation that is here with us tonight.”

Rice and solar system ambassador Ron Hobbs both love
this photo of a sunset on Mars, snapped by the Spirit rover in 2005.
Photo: NASA.

As the “eyes” of Mars Rice has worked with the rover cameras, so a big part of her presentation was a showing of her top 10 photos out of the hundreds of thousands of them that have been sent back from Mars. Her favorite is of a blue sunset on the Red Planet, taken by Spirit in 2005. Coincidentally, that is also a favorite of local Solar System Ambassador Ron Hobbs, with whom I was sharing a table at the event.

Rice hopes humans visit Mars some day, though she would not make a very good travel agent.

“Mars is a pretty awful place,” she said. “It’s a dry, desolate, barren wasteland.” The reason to go is to answer the big questions about life somewhere besides Earth.

“If we do find that Mars is a place where life could have survived, and if we do eventually send spacecraft to Mars that bring samples back, and we find evidence for ancient microbial communities on Mars, then we know we’re not alone, and that’s about as profound a thing that I can imagine happening in my lifetime,” Rice said.

She’s fond of her Mars robots, but says they do have their drawbacks. Curiosity, for example, when it’s driving on automatic navigation can only travel about 200 meters per day. The rover has to analyze a lot of data before every turn of the wheels to pick the most trouble-free route.

“The rover is thinking so hard that it doesn’t have time to drive any faster,” Rice quipped. The speed points out one reason that she’d like to see people on Mars some day.

“What those rovers have done in eight years a human could do in a couple of days,” Rice said. She’s excited for NASA’s proposed 2020 Mars mission, a Curiosity-class rover that would address key questions about the potential for life on Mars, and pave the way for human exploration.

Rice was moved to start on this great adventure, a career in space exploration, by a video she saw during a high school astronomy class. The video depicted how the Sun would one day run out and our solar system would be no more. But the universe would roll on.

“That is what inspired me to study astronomy,” Rice said. “This thing that is greater than ourselves will be around longer than any of us will.”

---

You can watch Rice’s entire presentation on the KCTS-9 website.

Getting "the kids" interested in astronomy

Much ink, many pixels, and and a great deal of time and energy have been expended of late on the pressing challenge of getting the younger generation interested and participating in astronomy. Astronomy magazine editor Dave Eicher recently blogged on the topic, noting that The Astronomical League devoted a huge chunk of the March issue of its magazine, Reflector, to the topic. Eicher and Astronomy are among the partners in the Astronomy Foundation, a nonprofit organization that aims to spread interest and enthusiasm for the hobby, particularly among generations X and Y.

All of this has me pondering the trajectory of my own interest in astronomy, considering how possible it really is for adults to get young people interested in anything, and wondering if the crisis of disinterest in science in general, and astronomy in particular, is real.

This sketch of a “Moon probe,” probably
NASA’s Lunar Orbiter, is in my space
scrapbook with other articles from 1966. It
was probably my first astronomy “post” at age 8.

The “about” page of Seattle Astronomy notes that I “grew up following Apollo and the race to the moon, and (have) been a space and astronomy buff ever since.” I was 11 years old when humans first walked on the Moon, just old enough to appreciate the adventure and daring of the race to get there, and too young to grasp the geopolitical implications of it all. I kept a scrapbook of clippings about aerospace news, most of them from the Seattle Times or from The Boeing News which my dad brought home from work. I occasionally put some of my own work in the scrapbook. The sketch and explanation of the “Moon probe” at left may well be considered my first space and astronomy “post.” Drawing has obviously never been my strong suit, but the rocket nozzle on top of my probe bears some abstract resemblance to the NASA Lunar Orbiter, so I’m guessing that’s what I was trying to depict. The drawing is in the scrapbook amidst some coverage of the Lunar Orbiter and Surveyor, all from 1966, so this was my work at age eight.

Clearly I was a space nut. There may well have been some adult encouragement along the way. I was subscribed to a series called the “Science Service Science Program” published by Nelson Doubleday.
Every month I would receive a new booklet on a science topic. The booklets were cool because they came with color sticker photographs that you licked and pasted into them; maybe the first “interactive” media.

Once in a while the series included a plastic model that you could assemble; I recall building a Mercury Redstone rocket. Many of the books were about various topics of space and exploration, as it was the hot topic at the time.

I don’t have any of the Science Service books in my possession. They might well still be at my mom’s house; I envision them right next to the once-priceless collection of baseball cards, reduced to dust by 45 years in a hot/cold attic. I may have to get up there and explore some day. Everything is available on eBay, though, and with a quick search of the auction site I found quite a number of people selling their science books from the 1960s. The brown cardboard cases held maybe a half-dozen booklets. According to an ad I found while searching the Internet, my dad was shelling out a buck a month for the Science Service books.

This lot of Science Service books published by Doubleday was recently
spotted for sale on eBay. I had many of these books as a kid in the mid-’60s.

Another vivid astronomy memory from when I was a little kid involved one of our neighbors, Pete Schultz, who built his own telescope. One time he showed me Jupiter through it, and I could see the planet’s bands and moons. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen! I don’t know how much observing Pete did over the years; we lived in Renton, a Seattle suburb, and the skies were probably never all that dark, though certainly they were better in the mid-’60s than they are now.

Though I had this interest in the cosmos, I did not make much effort to look at it. I could identify the constellations—Orion seemed especially huge when he stood in the middle of our street—and would go out to look at the occasional lunar eclipse. Most of my observing attempts involved comets. I was in high school when Kohoutek came around. The father of one of the guys in my Boy Scout troop had a telescope and set it up so we could have a look. That was a major disappointment; we all remember what a dud Kohoutek was. Somehow comet West slipped right by me. I remember reading about Halley’s Comet in the Science Service books and thinking, in the mid-’60s, that its 1986 return would NEVER get here! I missed Halley, which was mostly visible in the Southern Hemisphere. Later efforts to look at Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp through binoculars were more successful and satisfying. When I was 11 we stumbled upon the Perseid metor shower at a super-dark wilderness site; our scout troop coincidentally was on a backpacking trip during the peak of the shower, and it was spectacular. That was the extent of my astronomical observing.

I can pinpoint the moment that my interest reached the tipping point, astronomy became a full-fledged hobby, and I was turned into a space and astronomy writer. It was 2003, the year of the great apparition of Mars. I was working at the University of Puget Sound, which had developed a new course about Mars exploration, and I wrote an article about the course for Arches, the university magazine. (You can read a PDF version of the article here.) After spending a few days hanging around the physics department with astronomy Prof. Bernie Bates, I suddenly found myself enriching the coffers of Orion Telescopes and spending many a late night out in the cold with my 8-inch Dobsonian and wandering raccoons. My sweetie helped push me over the edge by giving me The Backyard Astronomer’s Guide for my birthday.

That’s my story. I have been a total space geek for about as long as I can remember and was good in math and science in school. I wound up in a humanities field, majoring in broadcast journalism in college, while maintaining a passing interest in astronomy over the years. It wasn’t until I was 45 that a great astronomical observing event combined with the opportunity to hang around with the right academics forged me into an active participant in the hobby. Adequate amounts of disposable income and spare time certainly helped.

So what can we do to get “the kids” interested in astronomy? I’m not certain that anything overt will work. Few tweens, teens, and 20-somethings want to be told what to do, and it’s hard to imagine them attending astronomy club meetings. I’ve been a member of several, and the topics seem to tend more toward high-level lectures about galaxy formation or in-depth talks about techniques of astrophotography or building an observatory. There’s not often much of a WOW factor there. Many young folks may well be buying telescopes and astronomy magazines, but they’re out looking at the stars rather than going to meetings.

I think that the best thing that we can do to interest young people, or anyone, in astronomy is to simply show them something interesting. Give them a look through a telescope or binoculars, or point out an beautiful naked-eye object. This week’s close grouping of Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury will be a good opportunity for this. Comet ISON may well provide another this fall. Get thee to a place where others might be and set up. Many folks will think, “That’s nice.” Others may have no interest at all. But you never know when you might be planting a seed.

Pete Schultz, the neighbor who first showed me Jupiter through his homemade telescope, passed away back in March, just a few days after his 77th birthday. I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately. I don’t know if he remembered giving me my first look through a telescope. But it’s something I’ll never forget, and I hope that he knows on some sort of cosmic level that his simple gesture made a big difference to a little neighbor kid. When my “star stuff” is released back into the universe, I hope that I’ve given just one person that kind of fond memory or inspiration. The seed may not blossom for a half century, and I may not be here to enjoy the flower. But its sweetness won’t be wasted.

Brilliant blunders can be portals to discovery

Mario Livio takes comfort in the gaffes of the greatest scientific minds of all time.

“There is something very reassuring in the fact that even these giants made major blunders,” he said during a talk Wednesday in Seattle to promote his new book. “People would ask me what the book was about; I’d tell them it’s called Brilliant Blunders, and it’s not an autobiography.”

Mario Livio spoke about his latest
book, Brilliant Blunders, May 15 at Town
 Hall Seattle. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

In Brilliant Blunders Livio, senior astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, examines major mistakes by some of the greatest scientists ever: Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Linus Pauling, Lord Kelvin, and Fred Hoyle. He talked about three of the examples during his lecture at Town Hall Seattle.

First, Livio took on Darwin and evolution, which Livio called “the single best idea that anybody has ever had.” Darwin’s blunder, though, was adopting a theory of blended heredity, which was a fairly widely accepted viewpoint of the time. Blended heredity held that the characteristics of a mother and father would be mixed, as one might mix a gin and tonic.

“Darwin did not understand, at first at least, that with blended heredity there is no way natural selection would have ever worked,” Livio said, noting that if you bred black and white cats, within a few generations you would only have gray. “In your gin and tonic, if you mix it with lots of tonic, in the end there is no gin.”

In Darwin’s time Gregor Mendel was coming up with the correct model for genetics, but Livio said Darwin didn’t know of Mendel’s work, and if he had he probably would not have understood it—“Darwin was very weak in mathematics,” he noted—but somehow Darwin had nailed evolution.

“When you have somebody who is a real genius some of the steps along the way may be wrong, but somehow their insight leads them to the correct result,” Livio said.

The next big blunder considered was Linus Pauling’s attempt to come up with a structure for DNA.

“Pauling’s model for DNA had the wrong number of strands, it was built inside out, and there was nothing to hold it together. Worse yet, he tried to hold it together with hydrogens,” Livio marveled. The “A” in DNA stands for acid, which Livio explained means that when you put it in water it should release hydrogen. But in Pauling’s model hydrogen was holding the structure together, so it couldn’t release it.

“Here was the greatest chemist of the world proposing a model the violated the basic rules of chemistry!” Livio exclaimed. He discusses Pauling’s shortcoming at length in the book, but said it may have been a combination of a race to publish and a bit of egotism from previous successes.

“If I work out the basic structure,” Livio surmised Pauling may have been thinking, “all of the other details will work out.”

Finally Livio took on Einstein, whom he called “the embodiment of genius.” Livio noted that when Einstein developed the theory of relativity he assumed that the universe was standing still. But that couldn’t be, because its gravity would cause it to collapse on itself. So Einstein added what Livio called a “fudge factor”—the cosmological constant—to make things balance out.

Then, when Lemaître and Hubble found the universe to be expanding, Einstein concluded he didn’t need the constant and took the term out of his equation. Fast-forward to 1998 and the discovery that the expansion of the universe was accelerating—because of the constant.

“Einstein’s blunder was to take the term out, not to put it in!” Livio said. “If he left that term in he could have predicted that the universe should be accelerating.”

The conclusion Livio draws from these brilliant blunders is that science can be messy and that there’s no straight line to the truth. Goofs are good.

“When you think outside the box you’re likely to make mistakes every now and then,” he said. “If you want to be certain all the time, your progress will be so incremental that you actually may miss the real breakthroughs.”

“This is not to advocate for sloppy science,” Livio continued. “This is just to say that you have to allow for these things that I call brilliant blunders. You have to allow for the possibility of making breakthroughs through processes that occasionally will actually hit upon various obstacles.

“Scientific blunders can be portals to discovery.”

Galileo was a sneak

Galileo still has many folks bamboozled. The narrative persists more than four centuries after he trained his telescope on Jupiter that Galileo’s discovery of the giant planet’s moons proved, despite the dogmatic objections of the church, that Copernicus was right about the sun being at the center of the solar system.

Dennis Danielson

Dennis Danielson says much of that common narrative is false. Danielson is a professor of English at the University of British Columbia. Milton is his professional bailiwick, but he’s got a strong interest in rhetoric and the history of science, which has led him to publish a couple of books on astronomy and astronomers. He’s the editor of The Book of the Cosmos (Basic Books, 2002) and wrote The First Copernican (Walker & Company, 2006). It was during his work on the latter, about Georg Joachim Rheticus, the young German mathematician who was largely responsible for getting Copernicus’s De revolutionibus published, that Danielson developed what he calls a “perfectly discreet, I assure you, love affair with Copernicus.”

Danielson spoke Thursday at the University of Washington astronomy colloquium, and later that evening at a meeting of the Boeing Employees Astronomical Society. He said that in addition to Galileo’s obvious genius in many areas, he was a top-notch public relations practitioner, a successful propagandist, and a bit of a sneak.

Danielson said Galileo wasn’t telling the whole story with his masterwork Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the publication that supposedly confirmed Copernicus and got Galileo into hot water with the Vatican.

“I really do want to be respectful of Galileo, but he sewed some misinformation, starting right on the title page of his work, that I would propose to you has played into the twisted story of cosmology” and some longstanding misperceptions, Danielson said.

The catch, according to Danielson, is that the title page and the entire Diologo depict the scientific debate as one between the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems. In fact, Ptolemy’s system was well on its way out by the time the Dialogue was published in 1632, and the system drawn up by Tycho Brahe in 1588 was much favored by scientists for many decades to follow. The Copernican model was not really proven for some 200 years.

In fact Galileo’s own observation of the phases of Venus in 1610, 22 years before Dialogue, essentially knocked Ptolemy out of the cosmological playoffs.

“This was in fact striking another blow to the scientific underpinnings of the Ptolemaic system,” Danielson said, “but this demonstration supports Copernicanism only if there is no alternative other than Ptolemy.”

But Tycho’s system was an alternative that also correctly predicted the phases of Venus. Kepler with The Rudolphine Tables in 1627, Riccioli with Almagestum Novum in 1651, and Hooke with An Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth from Observations in 1674 all tended to favor the Tychonic system over Copernicus more than a century after “De Rev” and 42 years after Galileo’s Dialogue.

“If the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems truly were the only two great systems of the universe, then you could logically affirm the one by denying the other,” Danielson said. “But Galileo was wrong that those were the two great systems. Not in his day, not in Hooke’s. There was a third, the Tychonic system, which answered most of the criticisms of the other geocentric and geostatic systems without getting into all of those absurd claims about a moving Earth.”

There were other scientific challenges for proving Copernicus. They couldn’t detect parallax, as it turned out the observations were not yet precise enough. Some stars appeared as disks in telescopes, which turned out to be an illusion but argued against Copernicus at the time. Scientists expected to observe a Coriolis effect if Earth rotated, but Coriolis didn’t get around to finally seeing it until 1835.

“The physics that underpinned Copernicanism wasn’t fully developed until Newton,” Danielson said, “and the scientific impediments to a full-scale acceptance of Copernicanism were not removed until the 19th Century.”

Danielson gives Galileo credit for being right in the end.

“His book was powerful. He so firmly planted the idea that there was an A or a B, so established that way of thinking, it became easy for us to forget” that Tycho’s was long the preferred model until Newton came up with the physics that supported the Copernican model.