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Every now again I get surprised by a photo, showing me something I didn’t know about. And I love it even more when that surprise is from an object I thought I knew!

So check out this incredible image of the nearby galaxy Centaurus A, a nearby galaxy harboring a whole slew of surprises:

[Click to galactinate, or get the 4000 x 4000 pixel version, or, if you're feeling frisky, cram this onto your hard drive: an image that's 8500 x 8400 pixels and 29 Mb in size! And trust me: you want to.]

Isn’t that stunning? This picture was taken by the MPG/ESO 2.2 meter telescope in Chile, and once you get over its beauty you’ll realize this galaxy is, frankly, seriously messed up.

Cen A is about 12 million light years away and has roughly the same mass as our Milky Way, containing a few hundred billion stars. The underlying glow of those stars is what makes that round background fuzz in the image, and takes on the familiar elliptical shape of many such galaxies. [Note: All the individual stars you see here are in our on galaxy, since we're inside ...

I do a roughly monthly segment with astronomer Seth Shostak on Big Picture Science, a radio show/podcast done by The SETI Institute. This month, Seth and I talked about the American Airlines dustup when they were planning to run an interview with reality-impaired antivaxxer Meryl Dorey. This story is a great victory for reality, and I’ve already written about the back story.

Never forget: this antivax issue is more than important: it is literally life and death. Because of lowering vaccine rates, pertussis outbreaks are so prevalent health officials in the state of Washington have declared it to be an epidemic. The governor has had to dip into emergency funds to the tune of $90,000 to finance an information campaign to get the word out.

But the money is secondary to the idea that babies and people with immune deficiencies are at risk of dying from a disease that is essentially totally preventable if everyone got their vaccinations and boosters.

I cannot state that any more simply. The antivax crowd says vaccines cause autism, vaccines cause neurological problems, vaccines hurt your immune ...

I worked with Hubble Space Telescope data for about ten years, and one of the most amazing things about that was seeing the images fresh off the mirror. Knowing that no human on Earth had ever seen that particular object that sharply was a thrill.

Not every Hubble observation gets turned into a gorgeous image, though. A lot of them don’t need to be for scientific publications, for one thing, and for another not every observation is of a targeted object for a specific purpose. Because of that, there are probably hundreds and hundreds of amazing objects — galaxies, nebulae, star clusters — buried in the data, waiting to be found.

That’s where you come in: the folks at the European Space Agency’s Hubble HQ are holding a contest they call Hidden Treasures. You can look through the Hubble observation archive for images and tweak them using online tools they provide, or you can really roll up your sleeves and use professional astronomical software to prettify the images. They’ve made a video explaining the Hubble archive, which may help.

The contest has nice prizes (an iPod Touch, ...

A little while back, I was at Utah State University to give a public talk about the threat from asteroid impacts and what we can do to stop them (PLUG ALERT: if you want me to come talk at your venue, my agent would love to hear from you).

While I was there I was interviewed by Utah Public Radio, and that interview is online.

I was also chatted up by the local TV station, KSL. I think it went OK, and they put it online as well:

[You may have to refresh this page to get the video to load.]

While I rather wish I had stated succinctly that even the basis of the "Mayan 2012 doomsday" nonsense is itself a gross misinterpretation of Mayan history, culture, and calendar, I think I was pretty clear. I have to walk a fine line sometimes: debunking crap doomsday scenarios like 2012 while also warning of real dangers like asteroid impacts… while neither over- or understating that danger. It’s a delicate balance.

A balance, I’ll note, which is apparently completely lost on some of the commenters on the KSL website who ...

When I’m getting the mid-afternoon drowsies, and looking for a comfortable, warm, cozy place to take a nap, what could possibly be better than… the impact crater-scarred surface of the Moon?

This may be the greatest blanket throw in the history of blankets. Who wouldn’t want to cuddle up in a little regolith?

And ZOMFSM and it comes with matching pillows! And there’s a floor cushion!

Supermoon, indeed.

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to Design for Mankind via Jeri Ryan on Pinterest.

The view from the International Space Station is always pretty cool, but when an astronaut points the camera at the Earth’s horizon and takes a series of short exposures, adding them together gives a view right out of Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s:

[Click to psilocybinate.]

Whoa, man!

Astronaut Don Petit took the pictures to make this composite. Basically, it’s a series of eighteen 30-second exposures added together so the motion of the ISS around the Earth makes the stars trail, the cities blur, and your mind expand, dude.

The brown and green glow over the horizon is the atmospheric aerosol layer; molecules that absorb sunlight during the day and release that energy at night. The red glow above that puzzles me; I’ve written about it before. It might be a reflection of lights from inside the space station, but I suspect it’s actually the aurora; it follows the curve of the Earth, and as you can see from the star trails the camera was pointed toward the poles — the direction you’re likely to see an aurora.

You can see faint star trails above the bright ones ...

The private company Space X is set to launch its Falcon 9 rocket with the Dragon space capsule to the International Space Station on Saturday, May 19, with a backup launch date of May 22.

The launch is set for 04:55 a.m. Eastern time, which is 09:55 08:55 UTC — there’ll be a live webcast at Space X’s site and no doubt NASA TV will carry it as well. They have what’s called an "instantaneous launch window", which means if they don’t launch right on time they can’t just wait a few minutes and try again; they’ll have to go to their backup date. The reason for this is the vagaries of orbital dynamics. The space station is circling the Earth, the planet is rotating underneath it, and the rocket itself has a certain amount of thrust to get Dragon into orbit so it can catch up to ISS. All this adds up to a single Go/No Go decision at the appointed time.

If all goes well, it’ll launch on Saturday, and then the Dragon will take a day to match orbits with ISS. ...

On May 11, the phenomenal astrophotographer Thierry Legault took another amazing picture of the Sun (See Related Posts below for more of Thierry’s work that’s been featured here at the BA blog). Setting up his equipment in the south of France, he captured this truly magnificent shot of our nearest star… and when you finish picking your jaw off the floor, stick around, because your amazement isn’t done yet:

[Click to hugely ensolarnate.]

I know, right? That HUGE sunspot cluster is Active Region 1476, which has been blorting out some small flares, but nothing major. That’s a bit surprising, given how big and active the magnetic field is in those spots. Still, the cluster has grown to something like 200,000 km (120,000 miles) stem to stern, and that one big spot is 100,000 or so km (60,000 miles) across. Mind you, the Earth is about 13,000 km (8000 miles) across, so keep that in mind when you’re looking at it.

But there’s more to see! Including the reason Thierry took this picture in the first place…

See the ...

Iceland has long been on my list of Places I Really Really Want to Visit. This video makes me want to go there even more.

[You may need to refresh this page to get the video to load.]

The video was the Grand Prize winner in the X Prize Foundation’s video contest "Why Do You Explore?", and it won videographer Joe Capra a $10,000 National Geographic Expedition of his choosing. Wow.

And Iceland! What a place! The chance to see something like this, or an active volcano (or another active volcano)… and then there’s this video promoting Icelandic tourism, which is totally adorable.

Of course, this picture does mitigate things somewhat.

We live on an amazing world, and there’s still so much of it left to see.

Via Wired and Ed Yong.

Because you simply cannot have enough incredibly beautiful photographs of aurorae in your life, here’s one taken near Tromso, Norway, on March 28, 2012 by photographer Helge Mortensen:

[Click to coronalmassejectenate, and you should.]

What a shot! Dead center in the picture is the Pleiades, the small cluster of bright stars. The bright object is the Moon, and to the lower right is Venus. If you look carefully, just above the horizon, lies Jupiter. To see it, start at the Pleiades, let your eyes move down and to the right to Venus, then keep going; Jupiter is in line with the clouds, just at the edge of the aurora itself.

I love how that one long swooshing ribbon of aurora cuts across the whole picture. See how it looks broader to the left, then narrower as you follow it to the right? That’s almost certainly perspective making it looks smaller. It’s probably something like 100 kilometers (60 miles) above the Earth’s surface and follows the Earth’s curve. The far end of it, near the horizon, is much farther away than the part at the upper left.

And despite all the drama occurring ...

Holy. Wow.

If you’re a Doctor Who fan, watch this.

I don’t care if you like this kind of music or not; that kind of instrumental mastery* is astonishing to watch. And while I like metal, I love the Doctor Who music, so the two together?

Allons-y and Geronimo!

Tip o’ the sonic to Buzzfeed.

* Haha. "Mastery". Get it? Don’t ever try to outnerd me. I will exterminate you.

… or, B’ak’tun The Future.

There’s some buzz going around the web right now because some Mayan archaeologists found wall writings in the Xultun ruins in Guatemala dealing with the Mayan calendar. The writing clearly shows the Mayan calendar extending well past 2012.

As you can imagine, this is being played up as (yet more) evidence the world won’t end come December.

Well, duh.

But the thing is, we already knew that. I mean, of course we know there’s nothing to any of the Mayan Apocalypse nonsense doomcriers are advocating. That’s all crap. But in this case, as far as I can tell, what they found doesn’t change much in this regard. It’s a fascinating archaeological find and gives insight on how the Mayans worked out their math and astronomy when it came to calendars — there are notes painted on the wall clearly describing the patterns of Venus and Mars in the sky, which is very cool — but I don’t think it changes the 12/21/12 nonsense at all.

Mostly because we already knew their calendars went past December 21 of this year! For one thing, the cycle that ends this year, the b’ak’tun, ...