Today The Times ran a piece by Sarah Vine (wife of education secretary Michael Gove) criticising the BBC’s ‘Wonders of the Universe’ and its apparently egocentric presenter Brian Cox.
To be fair to Cox it’s probably not his fault that the show is put together in such an over-the-top way. Not even Narcissus himself would have had the brass neck to stipulate this kind of treatment in his contract: long, lingering shots of the handsome professor silhouetted against a night sky, or languid close-ups of him gazing manfully into the middle distance, flashing his white teeth in a carefree yet attractively wistful smile. No, Cox is not the problem; he’s the symptom of a dreary and predictable strand of programme-making: the “sexing up” of fusty subjects.
Of course, physics and astronomy is a subject only for people with beards, elbow patches and monocles!
Has Sarah Vine never heard of Carl Sagan’s series Cosmos, which is essentially the programme that ‘Wonders…’ is modelled on? That program was hugely successful in educating American youngsters in the early 1980s about the wonders of the universe, and may even be one reason why science and technology is in better shape in the US than it is here.
It does seem that Brian Cox is getting unfair stick for being young, dashing and clever. I’m reminded of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where the inventor of the Infinite Improbability Drive gets “lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn’t stand was a smart ass”.
Just as Sagan’s Cosmos was a beautiful and – literally – wonderful series that opened peoples’ eyes to the Universe we live in, Brian Cox’s series aims to do the same 30 years later. So let’s turn the soundtrack back up, listen to what he has to say and be thankful that our TV license money is being spent on fantastic, eye-opening programming such as ‘Wonders…’.
Most of the streaks of light are planes plans passing by. The quicker flashes are meteors, and at 33 seconds you can see one of them explode in the lower left hand corner of the frame.
These are instructions on how to find Comet Lulin on the 1st of March 2009. To find it, look to the north and find The Plough. Draw a line between the stars that form the start of the dip and extend the line until you see the next brightest star, which is Regulus. Just up from Regulus at the 1 o’clock position, you’ll see Comet Lulin. It’s past its brightest point as it moves away from the Sun, so you’ll need very good conditions to have a chance of seeing it.
When students at South Tyneside Marine and Technical College learned about navigation at sea, they studied astronomy using the College’s planetarium and observatory. Now that navigation is done using the Global Positioning System, these facilities have become sadly unused. The college, now a place for general further education, is being redeveloped, which will see the observatory demolished and the telescope relocated to Stockton-on-Tees.
Last night, a few of us were lucky to get access to the scope and spend a couple of hours observing. It’s a 15″ Newtonian Reflector that’s built like a tank, and probably also weighs as much as a tank. Situated at the top of the main college building, it is supported by a reinforced steel column than runs from the ground floor up through the stair well, so the scope is very much part of the fabric of the building. Compared to the observatory at Kielder – which is architecturally interesting but a simple timber construction – this observatory has a kind of solidity and sense of permanence about it that makes you think that, given today’s need to build cheaply and quickly, its like will never be built again.
If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, the best time to see Comet Lulin will be when it passes Saturn and heads towards Regulus in the constellation of Leo from the 23rd of February onwards. It should be visible to the naked eye if you have clear skies and should look pretty good through binoculars.
A good way to track its progress – and find out how to spot it – is to use Stellarium. Stellarium is a piece of open source, cross-platform Planetarium software which has a database of 600,000 stars and other astronomical objects. However, a vanilla installation doesn’t have information about comets, so you have to add Lulin yourself.
To do this, you need to edit the Stellarium configuration file called ‘ssystem.ini’. This is found in different places depending on your operating system (note: you’ll probably need an admin/root password to do this):
Linux: /usr/share/stellarium/data/ssystem.ini Mac: /Applications/stellarium.app/data/ssystem.ini (ctrl-click on the Stellarium.app icon >’ Show package contents’) Windows: C:Program Files\Stellarium\data\ssystem.ini
At the bottom of the ssystem.ini file, add the following:
[lulin]
name = C/2007 N3 (Lulin)
parent = Sun
radius = 100
oblateness = 0.0
halo = true
color = 1.0,1.0,1.0
tex_halo = star16x16.png
tex_map = nomap.png
coord_func = comet_orbit
orbit_TimeAtPericenter = 2454842.112213313327
orbit_PericenterDistance = 1.211815031505141
orbit_Eccentricity = 1.000243857235593
orbit_ArgOfPericenter = 136.8421983153854
orbit_AscendingNode = 338.5047481504214
orbit_Inclination = 178.3725975895116
lighting = false
albedo = 1
orbit_visualization_period = 10000000000
Credit goes to Robert9 for the posting the above to this this forum, which is in turn based on data from the JPL Horizons database.
Once you save the file and run Stellarium, you should see Comet Lulin appear. Happy Comet watching!
Today, the Ministry of Defence published classified documents relating to UFO sightings in the UK between 1986 and 1992.
Those expecting high resolution photographs and detailed schematics of super-advanced alien tech may be disappointed to find thousands of poorly typed letters describing UFO sightings amounting to a stunningly feeble collection of evidence for extraterrestrial visitors.
There are also letters to the Prime Minister from distinguished organisations such as The Irish UFO Research Centre demanding that the UK Government release all the information they have on the program of ‘genetic cross breading[sic]… with potentially hostile “Greys”‘.
To think of the millenia in which we had no explanation for the bright object in the sky that gave us warmth and made our crops grow. Now, in the last few decades, science has finally revealed the true nature of the Sun, our nearest star.
Under a clear night sky, it’s good to look up and sense the beauty and magnitude of space.
Unfortunately a combination of urban sprawl and inefficient street lighting means that if you live in or near a city, it is becoming the case that if you want to see stars, the only way of doing it is to get a friend to give you a sharp tap on the head with solid object.
A less painful method – if you’re in the US anyway – is to partake in National Dark-Sky Week, “an event, usually occurring in April, during which people in the United States are encouraged to turn out their unnecessary outdoor lights in order to temporarily reduce light pollution”.
