Volcano. From. SPAAAAACE! Also JWST’s Crab Nebula and a fun book by my friend John Scalzi

November 13, 2023   Issue #643

Subscribers fling red hot magma across the caldera rim of my soul 

SciAm What SciAm

Stuff I’ve written for Scientific American

For the magazine last week I wrote about a pretty danged cool JWST image of the Crab Nebula. One of the coolest things about this is that the gaseous debris from the supernova explosion that created this nebula 1,000 years ago is expanding away from the center at well over 1,000 kilometers per second. That means that over time we can see the nebula getting bigger! There’s a way cool slider bar image showing the difference between the JWST image and one taken by Hubble in 2005, and you should look at it.

Then read what I wrote about professional astronomer friend of mine getting images that show the same thing. And then on The Old Blog about an amateur astronomer who also caught the expansion.

The Crab is up in the sky now not long after sunset. Been a while since I’ve taken a look at it through the ‘scope. I’ll have to fix that.

Pic o’ the Letter

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

I do love erupting volcanoes seen from space, and the combination of the Kamchatka Peninsula’s ridiculously high activity plus the wonderful Landsat 8 satellite makes for a bit of photographical drama.

My proof: The volcano Klyuchevskaya popping off a pretty danged big ash cloud:

Wow! This image, featured on NASA’s really terrific Earth Observatory website, shows the view from 700 km above Earth’s surface. The colors are not what you’d see from this height, though, because Landsat 8 has visible and infrared light detectors — this image is a combination of frames taken at 1.6, 0.86, and 0.56 microns. Only that last is visible to the eye, and we’d see it as green; however, that’s shown in blue here (typically, what is shown as blue in images is the shortest wavelength, which may or may not actually be blue IRL). The first two are infrared, shown in red and green, giving the image its somewhat eerie appearance.

The hot lava glows in the longest wavelengths most, so it appears red. The huge wedge-shaped cloud billowing off to the right is the ash plume, which reached heights of 12 km! That makes it an airplane hazard: ash consists of tiny sharp-edged and demonically jagged bits of rock and glass, which can chew up an airplane engine (or human lungs). The NASA site mentions schools nearby were closed, too (I’ll add it also spells the volcano as Klyuchevskoy, which is fine because it’s transliterated from Russian, so spellings vary).

The volcano is about 7,000 years old and erupts nearly continuously these days. It’s about 4,700 meters tall — over 15,000 feet, so yeah, big. I’ve written about it a few times back on The Old Site. It’s pretty cool.

Satellites like Landsat 8 do a great job of monitoring our planet. Volcanoes are one small piece of the vast work they do. They also watch land erosion, land use, water levels and motions, clouds, “civilization” encroaching on wild territory, pollution, climate change, and so much more. I’m glad they’re up there, because sometimes you need an eye in the sky to understand what’s happening down here on Earth.

Book ’em

Sometimes I read books

I don’t review books much here on the BAN for a couple of reasons. One is that I don’t read nearly as much as I used to; I write all danged day long and somehow reading isn’t the relaxing activity it once was.

The other is that reviewing books is hard. Same with movies and TV shows; if I like something I want to tell folks to read/watch it, but I hate (HATE) spoilers, so I don’t want to spoil a single iota of the thing I’m reviewing. So yeah, describing the plot makes it hard.

So, after that preamble let me just say that I loved John Scalzi’s latest book Starter Villain [affiliate link], and you should buy a copy (or get one at the library; I’m not your mom) and read it.

That’s all I really need to say, but just to go into a little more detail that’s maybe not spoiler-free but spoiler-minimized…

The book isn’t scifi per se, in that it’s more of a thriller along the lines of James Bond if Bond were, well, just some guy. And also a villain. But there are elements of scifi in it, including death rays and alien intelligences, but I’ll leave those at that.

What it is is funny. Very. I laughed out loud a lot. It’s also engaging, breezy, and fun. It’s another summer-reading-type book like his last one, Kaiju Preservation Society, so if that’s the sort of thing you enjoy then yeah, get it.

And, in the interest of full disclosure and all that, John and I are friends. Does this mean I would unfairly amp up his book because I like him? Well, maybe. I’m not invulnerable to bias, but I like to think I can circumvent it. In this case, maybe our being friends makes it easier for me to mention it here — hey, I support my friends! — but I don’t think I would give it a positive review if it weren’t good. And, honestly, I haven’t read a book by John I haven’t liked. So take that as you see fit.

But it is good, and you deserve a fun read.

Et alia

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