20k, Eclipse panel reminder, SciAm, and a pic of a spacecraft on the Moon (kinda)

September 18, 2023   Issue #618

Subscribers should be aware I appreciate all 20,000+ of you. 

About this newsletter

Ooo, meta

What the WHAT?

This happened over the weekend, and I am awed and wondering how such a thing could happen. 20,000 subscribers? Seriously?

I owe breaking through this round number to my friend Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, because she mentioned BAN in her own newsletter that she just started, and to which you absolutely should subscribe. Jenny is extremely funny and when you read her stuff (like her amazing books; check the left side rail of her blog to buy them because you absolutely should) you’ll think, haha, she is exaggerating for humor because no one and no one’s life are like that, but I assure you, she and hers very much are.

Anyway she sent a bunch of people here which put me over the top, and I appreciate it (and, I’ll, a day or two later I got another kick from my JWST M51 spiral galaxy issue getting promoted on Substack Reads). But of course a lot of you have been around a while now and without you I’d still be at some pathetic number of subscribers like 19,000 and how embarrassing would that be? Geez.

So thanks everyone for signing up, and I promise I’ll even sometimes write about astronomy instead of shamelessly promoting stuff I’m doing.

Shameless Self-Promotion

Where I’ll be doing things you can watch and listen to or read about

Hey don’t forget I’m moderating a NASA panel Tuesday night about really cool and fun science you can do during upcoming solar eclipses in October and April! These are real science experiments you can do to help real scientists understand the Sun, the Earth, and our environment. It will be fun and informative, so sign up to watch.

SciAm What SciAm

Stuff I’ve written for Scientific American

Another reminder: I write stuff for Scientific American! My regular Friday column (called Over Your Head and we’re still working on the banner for it) last week is about seeing satellites zipping around the sky, so that’s fun.

I also write Opinion pieces for them, too, and my last one published on Thursday is about the connection between chucklheaded Apollo Moon landing denial and pretty much every other awful and disgusting anti-science conspiracy theory out there, including evolution denial, anti-vaxx stuff, and even the pure evil of fossil fuel companies knowingly cooking the planet even while funding massive (and I do mean massive) disinformation campaigns downplaying or denying it. Sure, the Moon hoax stuff is pretty silly, but the overlap in technique and biases between it and the others is basically a circle.

It’s funny; I struggled to write that one. A lot of it had to do with my moving across the country and being rather addlepated by it, but also because I just didn’t know what to say. Finally, after blowing off my editor for weeks (sorry, Dan) I just sat down and flippin’ wrote it. I fretted over it for a while, thinking it wasn’t coherent or didn’t say anything important, but sent it to my editor to see what he thought, expecting him to have about a billion edits. Instead he thought it was great, and sent it on to different editor to go over since I mentioned him in it (avoiding a conflict of interest) and that editor liked it too!

The moral here is that writers tend to be crap at self-reflection. Apparently I need to write stuff I think isn’t very good more often. I’ll get right to that.

Anyway if you wanna see my stuff at SciAm this page will always have them all. Thanks.

Pic o’ the Letter

A cool or lovely or mind-bending astronomical image/video with a description so you can grok it

Oh right, space stuff. Here’s something on topic then:

On August 23, 2023, the Indian Space Research Organization successfully landed a rover on the Moon. The Chandrayaan-3 lander touched down at a lunar latitude of about -70°, well down in the southern hemisphere (many places reported that as being at the south pole, but is in fact about 600 km north of that point).

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, one of my favorite missions, took images of the site about four days later, and you can — barely, but still — see the lander in the image!

The lander is in the center of the white square (the square is about 340 meters wide). You can tell something’s different if you look at shadows. This is in the deep southern hemisphere, so the Sun shines down from the north (from the left, more or less). Craters are depressions in the surface, so for any given crater the side on the right is lit up and the side on the left is shadowed and dark.

But the Chandrayaan-3 lander sticks up above the surface, so it casts a shadow to the right. Also, it’s surrounded by bright white material, which is lunar regolith (powdery dust made of rocks eroded by sunlight and day/night thermal changes and has the consistency of volcanic ash, very fine jagged pieces of murder rocks) disturbed by the landing rocket. Sunlight darkens the surface over time, so if you mix it up the brighter stuff underneath gets moved upward and is more obvious.

This issue of the BAN is free, so you may also feel free to share it with someone!

Super cool! The rover deployed the day after the landing (and is too small to be seen in the LRO images) and began its study of the surface. This makes India the fourth country to successfully soft-land on the Moon (after the USSR, US, and China). A small group, but likely to grow significantly in the near future.

And a final thought: You should know that this image is one small piece of a vastly larger strip of lunar real estate snapped by LRO — scroll down to the bottom of the LRO page to see just how huge it is. I know that the landing site was known to some accuracy, so it’s not like they had to search the whole freaking Moon to find it, but it’s still a teeny needle in a huge regolithstack. Amazing work.

Et alia

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!