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A repost, apropos of this weekend’s supermoon and the fact that people are going bugnut over it… yet again… and Taslima seemed lonely in being the only other FtBer covering this one. My original post is here, published March 17, 2011. Look up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s a [...]
Posts Tagged ‘space’
Supermoon: what it is, and what it definitely isn’t (a repost)
May 6th, 2012 
Jason Thibeault 
Posted in Pseudoscience, Science, Space 
Tags: astrology, earthquakes, moon, predictions, pseudoscience, science, skepticism, space, supermoon 
No Comments »On this day in space history
March 22nd, 2012 Jason Thibeault On March 22, 2001, an outer main belt asteroid provisionally named 2001FB10 was discovered by David Healy, founder of the Junk Bond Observatory. Its official name is 153289 Rebeccawatson. That’s right, it was named after the woman probably most famous for making a whole lot of very insecure men very angry about having their sense [...]
Posted in Geekery, Gender, Privilege, Space Tags: asteroids, privilege, Rebecca Watson, skepticism, space 12 Comments »Supernova in M-95
March 19th, 2012 Jason Thibeault Awesome. In an extremely close galaxy, one we’ve studied quite a bit previously, we’ve apparently just spotted a supernova and have started grabbing as much scientific data as we can manage. Of course, this is millions of light years away (estimated 38 million in fact), so unless you subscribe to the idea that everything “happens” [...]
16 year old girl Hacks the Tube almost into space to get into MIT
February 6th, 2012 Jason Thibeault Via Boing Boing, this is absolutely awesome. As part of their Early Action Admits, MIT challenges prospective students to hack the tube the enrollment letter came in into something cool. So one 16-year-old girl put a camera, a GPS, and two Ham radio transmitters, strapped it to an 800 gram helium balloon, and sent it [...]
The Birth of the Moon
February 3rd, 2012 Jason Thibeault An intriguing documentary has caught my eye with its slick teaser trailer. We like the moon. Because it is close to us. I can’t wait to see this doc when it’s out. I’ve had a long-standing love affair with the moon and its effects on our planet. I’ve posted quite a bit about it in [...]
The Aurora over Norway
January 31st, 2012 Jason Thibeault Here, have some beautiful high-res time lapse photography by Bjørnar Eilertsen in Kristiansund, Norway, on January 24th, following the recent coronal mass ejection event. That’s “solar flare” to non-geeks. There’s even more pretty pictures and videos at The Atlantic.
Newt’s new windmill: a moon base by 2020
January 28th, 2012 Jason Thibeault That’s right, Newt Gingrich wants a permanent American-controlled moon base by the end of his second term in office. Don’t worry Republicans, he’s not suggesting, you know, actual funding by the government or anything — just that private enterprise will, somehow, for some inexplicable reason, become motivated to find ways to do it. Speaking in [...]
Posted in Politics, Science, Space Tags: imperialism, Invisible Hand of the Market, magical thinking, Martin Bashir, moon, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Newt Gingrich, space 8 Comments »First Earth-sized exoplanets found!
December 20th, 2011 Jason Thibeault NASA reports that the Kepler mission has discovered the first Earth-sized exoplanets ever discovered. What’s even wilder: they found the pair of them in the same damned system.
Posted in Science Tags: Earth-sized exoplanets, exoplanets, Kepler mission, nasa, space 3 Comments »A cloaked ship the size of Mercury? That’s the BEST explanation?
December 10th, 2011 Jason Thibeault I want you to watch this video with the sound off, ignore the title on top, watch it a bunch of times, and figure out what you think is going on. Hold that thought. Then play it again, stop brain-filtering the title (if you can manage this trick, tell me how!), then compare notes.
Posted in Pseudoscience, Space Tags: aliens, coronal mass ejections, Mercury, occam's razor, space 17 Comments »Kepler confirms: Super-earth found in star’s habitable zone!
December 6th, 2011 Jason Thibeault A milestone find by the Kepler mission: a planet a little over twice the size of Earth, situated in the Goldilocks zone of its star where liquid water can exist at the surface. Which by extension means that, if this planet is terrestrial and has water, there’s the possibility of life as we know it.
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