As you may have heard, millions of people took to the streets across the country (and even the globe) to attend the No Kings protest against Trump’s naked, illegal, and unconstitutional power grab. By coincidence this happened right after peaceful protests in Los Angeles were disrupted by police, which then prompted the GOP to start lying about how these were riots, which laid the groundwork for Trump to (again, illegally) send in the California National Guard and Marines. Not-so-coincidentally the protest was also the same day as Trump’s sad little $45 million military birthday parade.

I’ve seen estimates of up to 6 million people protesting, which sounds about right, if a bit low. I went to the protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, which was located at the same place as the past few organized rallies. It was on the sidewalks along the very busy Route 29 through town. The head of the line was at an intersection where the light keeps a lot of cars backed up, so it’s great for visibility.

I was there with a friend, who took this shot of me:

It was my wife’s idea a while back to bring a flag; the far right has usurped this symbol of the US for too long, and it’s well past time for us to take it back. It does not mean mindless nationalism, but a devotion to putting into reality the ideals of the people. Y’know, actual patriotism. 

I have a ton of thoughts about the protest, so I decided to make a short video about it. Please watch:

[Sorry the vid is vertical; I recorded it for TikTok which has pretty good autocaptioning. The audio is a bit low too; I’m not sure why.]

The bottom line: It’s easy to feel hopeless and helpless. Calling your representatives helps (a lot) but if you need to lift the fog of mental inertia, attending a protest like this really, really helps.

I recently posted a Hubble Space Telescope image of the magnificent Sombrero Galaxy a few days ago — it’s a lenticular (lens-shaped) disk galaxy we see nearly edge-on. It’s very smooth looking, with very little star-forming gas. It does have a band of dark dust ringing it, probably the remnants of a smaller galaxy that collided and merged with it million of years ago.

But one of the hallmarks of the Sombrero is how smooth it is, nearly featureless, with the light from its billions of stars blending together to give it a velvety, pearly countenance.

So when the folks with JWST released a new image of it, my first quick reaction was, “meh”.

The interior of the galaxy looks about normal, but around the edges the glow takes on a grainy texture, like an underexposed photograph. In digital images that are low-contrast or underexposed you can get what’s called pixel noise, where random electrons in each pixel make the image look like it’s grainy.

So I wasn’t too impressed, and for a moment even wondered why they’d release such a low-quality image. But then I realized… they wouldn’t. So, with a slightly wry grin, I downloaded the full resolution 12,000 x 11,000 pixel 100-Mb monster, and displayed it at native resolution.

And I almost literally slapped my head. I got fooled. Again. 

That isn’t grain around the galaxy. Those are stars.

Yeah. From 30 million light years away, we’re seeing the resolved glow of individual stars, which, in a compressed, small image tricked me into thinking they were photo grains. In this cutout, which I grabbed from the lower left part of the galaxy, you can see how the stars get closer and closer together to the upper right, eventually blending into the familiar smooth glow of the overall galaxy.

What irks me is that this isn’t the first time I’ve let myself think an image of a nearby galaxy wasn’t so great. Years ago, when astronomers released a Hubble image of the Andromeda galaxy, I thought the exact same thing. Duh. You’d think I’d learn.

Anyway, this shot of the Sombrero was taken with JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (or NIRCAM), which can see relatively shorter wavelength infrared light. In this case, this image is from multiple shots using filters that go from 0.9 microns to 4.44 (the longest wavelength our eyes can see is roughly 0.75 microns, give or take). Last year, the JWST folks released an image taken using MIRI, the camera that sees mid-infrared (longer) wavelengths, and the galaxy looks really different!

At those wavelengths cosmic dust (tiny grains of sooty and rocky material expelled by dying stars) is much brighter than stars, so the dust ring which looks faint in the NIRCAM image above is much more obvious in the MIRI shot. That’s why we use different filters and cameras; different aspects of the same object become more clear when we examine them in different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.

If you look at the close-up image above, the bright object just above and to the left of center is likely a star in the Sombrero, but the fuzzier object in the corner to the upper right is probably a globular cluster, a collection of hundreds of thousands of stars all packed into a spherical volume only a few dozen light-years wide. Our Milky Way has at least 160 such clusters, but the Sombrero has around 2,000! Most galaxies seem to have more than we do, which I’ve always found odd. I’m not sure why. I guess I have some reading to do.

 Images like this help us understand the kinds of stars in the galaxy, its overall shape, and its internal structure. The Sombrero is a weird beast, and observations across the spectrum will hopefully help give us some insight into what makes it work.

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