A series of short, fun things

What’s Up?

Look up! There’s stuff to see in the sky!

Don’t forget that the Moon will occult Mars on the evening of December 7 (Wednesday night) for US folks and the morning of December 8 for people in Europe! This is a naked eye event, though binoculars or a telescope will make it even better. I have the details in yesterday’s BAN issue and also in my article for Scientific American.

Note that in my email yesterday I wrongly said the occultation is tonight. I corrected that in the online version and my apologies to everyone for the confusion! But I do urge you to go look tonight so you can get a sense of the Moon getting closer to Mars. A little anticipatory build-up adds to the fun.

Also, the Virtual Telescope Project will be streaming a live view of the event, so if it’s cloudy or not visible from where you are, point your browser there!

Upcoming Appearances/Shameless Self-Promotion

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

My apologies for this being late, but I just found out that Goodreads is holding a giveaway contest for my upcoming book, Under Alien Skies: A Sightseers Guide to the Universe! They’re giving away 50 copies to members of the site. All you have to do is enter your name and address and you’re entered (that info is in case you win, so the publisher can send you your copy).

I’ll note it’s only for folks in the US (I have no control over that; sorry). The contest ends on December 8 so if you’re in the States enter ASAP!

The book comes out April 18, 2023 and you can preorder it here if you’d like. Thanks!

Personal Stuff

Because I’m a person

Today — December 6, 2022 — is the birthday of my brother (Happy Birthday Sid!) as well as my friend Torri Higginson: Stargate fans, she played none other than Dr. Elizabeth Weir. She has a nice Instagram feed, so why not go over there and send her your best wishes? She’s terrific.

Life Exoplanet Hacks

Not what you might expect from an astronomer, but in my defense I am alive

STEM Educators: The European Space Agency is hosting an Exoplanet Hackathon in April and May, where students can look at real data of planets orbiting other stars and learn how to analyze them! This is a great idea to help introduce students to astronomy, exoplanets, coding, and more.

The main page is here, and they have a lot more info on their announcement page. I’m not sure if this is for ESA member states or open more generally, but they have a lot of activities and information available for you to run your own version. Check it out!

Astro Tidbit

A brief synopsis of some interesting astronomy/science news

You may not be aware that the European Southern Observatory is currently building the Extremely Large Telescope, a behemoth with a mirror 39 meters across, making it by far the largest optical/near-infrared telescope on the planet.

It’s hard to imagine just how huge it’ll be, so here’s a photo the ESO just posted showing the construction of the ELT dome:

Yegads. It’s immense. That crane on the left is 120 meters tall!

How powerful will this telescope be? The pupil of the human eye is what lets light in for our retina to detect. At its widest it can be about 0.8 centimeter across.

The area of a circle increases as the diameter squared. The ELT is 3,900 times wider than a pupil, so it collects 3,900 x 3,900 = 15 million times as much light as your eye*. That’s a lot. It’ll see far fainter objects in far greater detail than any such telescope ever made, and will revolutionize astronomy once it’s completed. That’s expected in 2027. Holy wow, I can’t wait.

* Correction: I originally divided by 0.8^2 to get an answer of 25 million, but that was incorrect, since 3,900 is the actual size of the ELT mirror in units of eye size. Had I used the size of the mirror in centimeters, and then divided it by the size of a human pupil, it would’ve been correct.

Another Astro Tidbit

Because you deserve more astronomy news

The Breakthrough Listen project is a scientific research program to use radio telescopes to search for signals from alien civilizations, termed technosignatures. They just announced they have begun new observations using the MeerKAT radio array in South Africa to look at thousands of relatively nearby stars to look for such signals.

MeerKat is a collection of 64 radio dishes, each about 13 meters in diameter, that are spread out over a large area. When combined, their power to resolve sources in the sky is very high, so it can detect detailed structures. They’re used for lots of astronomical observations, observing large swaths of the sky at once. Almost always, that parcel of sky will contain stars of interest to people looking for signs of intelligent life.

The new Breakthrough Listen hardware can analyze those signals rapidly to look for any technosignatures. The beauty of this is that this happens during routine astronomical observations, with the data being shared, so there’s no need to take up time looking at specific targets.

We have no idea if other intelligent, technological civilizations exist in the galaxy — our current best guess is that odds are low, but the bottom line is we really don’t know. So I think it’s a good idea to listen. Plus, the engineering developed for these searches can push our tech pretty far, which in turn helps develop new technology. Win-win. And if we do detect aliens? Well, that’s a big win as well. It’s worth looking.

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!