BAN #433: Bagana volcano from spaaaace, Crash Course Coins

6 June 2022 Issue #433

June 06, 2022

Pic o’ the Letter

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

I am such a sucker for volcano images taken from space. In my defense, they are SO COOL.

Like this one: Mount Bagana in Papua New Guinea, taken by the newly commissioned Landsat 9 Earth-observing satellite:

[Bagana volcano in Papua New Guinea imaged by Landsat 9 on May 28, 2022. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.]

Wow! The volcano is on Bougainville Island, which is about 120 x 80 kilometers in size. There are several volcanoes on it, though Bagana is currently the only active one.

And it’s active. It’s been erupting quite a bit for the past 20 years, and has been known to have some activity fairly continuously for 180+ years. In the image you can see lots of different lava flows; dark brown ones are new, and form long lobes up to 50 meters thick! Imagine see a lava flow as high as 15 story building… I wasn’t surprised to read that the lava tends to be very viscous and slow moving. That makes sense since the flows can be so deep.

You can see lighter green areas where vegetation is growing back after older flows, and the darker green of old vegetation around it. It’s a tropical island not far south of the equator, and incidentally has about 300,000 people on it.

You can read more about all this on the NASA Earth Observatory site, which is where I saw this image, and also grab a larger, higher-res one as well (which you want to see because it’s gorgeous). I love that site.

Landsat 9 launched in 2021, and is the latest and most cutting edge of the venerable series of satellites. It looks for natural and human-made change on the land, using two instruments, one which observes in visible, near-infrared, and shortwave wavelengths, and another which observes in the thermal infrared. Both can map things like vegetation and see changes in it at decent resolution. This is one of many ways that NASA and the US Geological Survey can watch over the health of our planet.

Blog Jam

[I always swear I’ll never make any Uranus jokes, but then I come up with a few I haven’t seen before. Bonus Jimi Hendrix references, too. From Wednesday’s article. Credit: Uranus: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Kevin M. Gill; Neptune: NASA/JPL-Caltech]

Upcoming Appearances/Shameless Self-Promotion

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

As you may know, a few years ago I wrote and hosted Crash Course Astronomy, an online 46-part video introduction to astronomy. I was ridiculously honored when Hank Green asked me to do this, and it has turned into one of the things I’ve done I’m most proud of. It’s had a staggering 70+ million views in total, last I checked some months ago, and there’s hardly a day that goes by even now, over 6 years after the last episode went live, where I don’t get a note from someone who watched it. Every time someone says it helped them pass their astro class or they just wanted to know more and it helped, well, my heart another size.

Recently Hank sent me a note asking if he could send me something. I said of course, and what I got was this amazing gift:

[Crash Course coin. Credit: Crash Course Coin / Phil Plait]

The coins were created to raise money for the courses; two were minted and stamped with “2,000 Learners” or “10,000 Learners”, meaning that by buying one you’d help that many people get access to the videos. Despite being $100 and $500, both sold out, and they minted 500 of the 10,000 Learners coin. Wow.

A few were stamped without the numbers and given to a few of us who participated in the videos.

It’s easy, sitting at my desk alone at home clicking away on my mouse and keyboard and putting words on the screen, to forget that there are people on the other end of the connection, and they can be profoundly affected by what I do. This is true for everyone, but I have been fortunate enough to be able to reach a pretty wide audience, and I try not to ever let that slip my mind. I keep that coin on my desk to remind me of that every day.

The obverse side of the coin says, “Knowledge weighs nothing. Carry all you can.”

It also does not weigh less when you give it away. In fact, it boosts you up.

Thank you to Hank, John, and everyone involved with Crash Course. I try very hard every day not to lighten my load.

[P.S. The 2022 10,000 Learners coins are sold out, but the 2,000 Learners coins are still available.]

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!

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