Chris Lintott’s Universe

This makes me extremely angry. And it’s dangerous too. In the US, when the religious lobby attempt to import creationism into science classes, there’s the constitutionally defined separation between church and state to fall back on, and so it is sufficient to demonstrate in court that Intellegent Design/Creationism is not science. British schools have no such protection, and if the government really does intend to hand over some say about the curriculum to private bodies we might be dealing with groups of British schoolchildren being fundamentally mislead over the status of evolutionary theories sooner than you might think.

Rather than rebut everything myself, have a look at the excellent Panda’s Thumb, especially the record of Fuller’s comments in the trial itself.

Rant to the Guardian follows. It’s only this short because it’s early, and I have a job interview to prepare for.

Dear Sir

I was disturbed to see the coverage awarded to Prof Fuller in today’s Education Guardian, a feeling accentuated by the uncritical nature of the report. To take a single example, Fuller is allowed to claim that despite his pro-’Intellegent Design’ stance that he ‘draws the line at
creationism’. However, one of the main conclusions to emerge from the recent trial in Dover, Pennsylvania was that ID is merely a foil for creationists seeking a new way to work their philosophy into science classes. The first book to systematically use the term ‘intellegent
design’, ‘Of Pandas and People’, was created (intellegently or otherwise) from its predecessors simply by judicious use of the find and replace function, turning every mention of the word ‘creationism’ with ‘intellegent design’. Good marketing, but ID is no more science than
creationism, and to draw a distinction between the two is simply misleading.

Prof Fuller also points out that ‘if you were having a science studies class, all the things I was saying would be completely normal’. Here we agree, but if he wants to campaign to introduce science studies into the school curriculum shouldn’t he do that directly instead of subverting
biology?

An excellent lecture last night at the BAA by Doug Ellison who is doing incredible things with images from the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. He highlighted a result I hadn’t seen before – Spirit’s image of the Orion Nebula. It may not look much, but astronomy from the surface of another planet impressed me!

A wonderful sequence of images from Pete Lawrence obtained as part of the Sun program filming yesterday. Using a hydrogen-alpha filter it was possible to view the gas 2000km or so above the visible surface of the Sun (the ‘photosphere’) and see the kind of prominences only normally on show at an eclipse.

We also got to use a calcium filter provided by John Adair, which was a new experience for me and showed sunspot groups in the process of changing and evolving.

Have been filming for the BBC4 special on the Sun – to be broadcast on the 20th February as part of a two-part series (the other is on the Moon, was filmed earlier in the year and is excellent) – which included an interview with Fred Espernak. He showed us what I think is the best picture of totality I’ve ever seen.

It was taken from the deck of a ship in the Pacific in an extremely short totality (less than minute) and is a composite of seven different shots. The ship apparently was rocking all over the place and Fred didn’t even get a chance to look at the Sun. For Turkey in March I won’t be ruining my second totality (and hopefully the first clear one) by looking through a viewfinder. He’s seen fourteen, so I’m glad he missed this one visually.

incidentally, I’d like to hear from anyone who is going to be viewing the March eclipse as part of our preparation for the program we’re making about it. Just leave a note in the comments or drop me an email.

With NASA’s New Horizons probe to Pluto about to take off (with any luck) I can’t help but think that it’s a few years too late. Assuming it can be launched by early February, it will swing by Jupiter and arrive at the ninth ‘planet’ in nine years time, which is pretty fast. However, the concept of a Pluto mission has been seriously discussed since the end of the Voyager grand tour and it’s always been pitched as a race against time – Pluto’s tenuous atmosphere is expected to freeze onto the surface as the planet moves away from the Sun (making Pluto effectively a comet, albeit in a low-eccentricity orbit). The last perihelion was in 1989, so more than twenty years before the probe’s arrival. With four of the six instruments which are going to study the “planet” looking at the atmosphere, it’s going to be pretty dull if the atmosphere is sitting on the surface. Recent results show that Pluto’s largest satellite, Charon, has no atmosphere which may suggest the freeze-out has already occurred.

I hope I’m wrong, and of course there is a proposed extended mission to several other large outer-solar system bodies. But it does seem like a shame that it’s been left so late.

Made it back to London after a fairly uneventful flight back. We did head into downtown San Francisco, but as I was terminally sleep deprived I’m afraid it seemed like a dream. A dream featuring a world famous prison, so par for the course really!

One of the memories of Mauna Kea that sticks is the sight of a gorgeous halo around the Moon. While not exactly rare, it was the first time I’d seen something like this with the Moon overhead, and it was a deeply erie experience to be standing underneath this ring of light. A sci-fi director’s dream to say the least!

It seems from the Sky at Night mailbox that haloes have been common in the UK over the last week or so, too, so for the record the explanation is due to ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. The hexagonal shape of the crystals refracts the light by 22 degrees, which is the radius of the halo.

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

As will probably be obvious in the final program that we’re filming out here, I have a very strong affection for the JCMT as it’s the telescope that I’ve used for my own observations. It was wonderful to be sitting in the control room yesterday as the scientists from Cambridge worked on commissioning the new receiver HARP-B which is going to producing amazing results in the next few years or so. Esentially, it’s a spectrograph sensitive to a whole range of molecular transitions but it has one feature which makes it a huge improvement on previous instrumentation – it produces an image and then takes many thousands of spectra, one for each pixel in the image. There’s a lot of work still to be done but the first results – on a bright line in Orion – look promising and I can’t wait to attempt to get my hands on it.

Spectra and spectrographs get buried under the avalanche of wonderful images, but are often responsible for much of the exciting science. Expect to hear much more about HARP results on the Sky at Night before too long!

Just about to go back to the summit to film sunrise, but had to share UKIRT’s image of the chicken nebula. An imposing presence, especially when I kept catching his/her gaze out the corner of my eye while trying to conduct an interview.

However, as this is a region in which stars are forming and the Egg Nebula is a planetary (marking the end of a Sun-like star’s life) we can definitively conclude that the chicken does come before the egg.

Wonderful day up on the mountain yesterday visiting Gemini North. There are new photos up on the Flickr stream including an excellent shot (if I do say so myself) of Gemini open and ready for the night. The sides of the dome open up to allow a smooth flow of air, keeping the mirror clean and the seeing stable. Or at least that’s the theory – there was a freezing wind last night and once they’d opened up the sides to show off for the camera they were quickly shut again.

Sunset on the mountain is spectacular – none of my photos (yet!) do it justice, but this is an amazing image of the Moon rising through the shadow of Mauna Kea.