Dark Bubbles from Black Moth Super Rainbow

One of my favorite bands in recent years, Black Moth Super Rainbow (who just happen to be from Pittsburgh), is releasing their new album “Eating Us” on May 26.  Like the other BMSR songs, this album has awesometacular song titles like “Born On A Day The Sun Didn’t Rise” (free mp3), “Iron Lemonade” and “Tooth Decay.”  You have to like a band that has videos like “Sun Lips” found on their last album”Dandelion Gum” (that I’ve posted here before), that depicts City of Pittsburgh workers cleaning up dead animals in the most unlikely of places.  From what I hear of the new album, it sounds just as good.  Take a listen:

Listen to “Born on A Day The Sun Didn’t Rise”:

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Hopping on the BMSR bandwagon is none other than the already uber cool Kanye West, pegging his already sky high coolness quotient to the level of “genius cool.”  Kanye links to the new video”Dark Bubbles” in his blog for all to see.  The video is interactive!  You can use your mouse – and even your webcam – to control time lapse of the video’s celestial background in the scene’s lighting.  And hey, who doesn’t love trampolines?  Check it out.  Too bad you couldn’t control the the disco-Aragorn and have him bounce across the desert…

What are some of your favorite bands/videos out there?

And also for your surreal viewing pleasure, relive Sun Lips:

This is for a friend whom I encourage to always find themselves in the amazing things around us.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
by William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Photograph by Han Sang Bong, AstroKorea.com

This blue belongs to no one.
by Jean-Michel Maulpoix

It is neither the property of man nor the kingdom of the gods.   It circulates and expands, spreading far and wide the mobile matter of its own dream. The polished and unfinished exchange their virtues in it.   If there is no soul or principle, at least blue exists, always ready to open up in the grayness of days, offered to anyone and for nothing, like the palm of an empty hand, and like a promise everyone knows will not be kept. It is good like this: this light on our misery, this beauty near our death.   Enough to keep on writing books, painting canvases, loving, and composing music. To try to hold the day against yourself. And ever after more misery, mixed with more beauty. As long as we can, we will accompany the passing of time with our fingertips.

Hello!  Sorry so “silent” lately – the normal school workload, plus some extra reading for the summer coming up, plus trying to get the UC Observatory up and running makes Davin something something.  Well, I guess that would be “deblogged.”  When things get to the point where I only have 3 budgeted mouse clicks per day to post something, you can always check my Facebook page, where it is uber easy to throw out links and make inane comments about cat photos.  Wordpress (my blogging software) should have an API that makes things so easy, but maybe that would short circuit the world’s productivity.

Catching up on the personal front: school is rolling right along for me, and J is almost done with her internship year, known in the technical medical vernacular as The Year of Hell.  She’s about to survive 3 entire months of the ICU (which is like Survivor: Hospital, only with worse food), and she’s about to take The Big Board exam for her medical license next month.  To prepare, she’s doing thousands and thousands of practice questions.  And I thought I had a lot of studying!

Moving to the otherworldy,I was recently awarded a summer research internship at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tuscon, Arizona, where I will begin what is sure to be my long term dependence of government funding.  Being employed by The Man aside, I’ll be spending the summer working on a great project reducing high resolution spectra from stars who are known to have extrasolar planets, in an effort to the chemical signatures of stars who may have eaten their planets.  Yes, the economy really is that bad everywhere.  I’ll also get some time on the 2.1m telescope, shown on the right, and perhaps, if we’re lucky, the 4m Mayall telescope.  Exciting!  Time to start the anti-monsoon dance to keep away the torrential rains so famous in Arizona in the summer time.

At some point, UC ferretted me out of my astronomy-hole, and a very nice writer named Kim Burdett wrote a piece about me for the College’s monthly newsletter.  Thankfully, she didn’t mention my other research interest: scientifically dissecting the hair styles from this movie.

Speaking of music and folks who return to the study of the Universe later in their life, it was announced some months back that Brian May, the guitarist from Queen, who recently completed his long-delayed Ph.D. in astrophysics, electronic music emperor Jean Michel Jarre, and none other than Phil Collins are teaming up for a concert to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy.  Not much information about the “Music of the Stars” has come since the announcement last fall of this mega-concert, which was slated for July in the Canary Islands.  Jarre has been “scoring the universe” for decades now, describing the mysterious, powerful and inspiring nature of the Universe through his trademark analog synthesizer compositions. If Jarre’s name isn’t familiar, you’ve probably heard at least one of his compositions somewhere.  In the planetarium world, especially in the 70s and 80s, Jarre’s music was one of the Gold Standards of music you’d use to accompany an audience’s trip through deep space.  Let’s hope this concert goes through!

Hey, it was the age before MTV – and they had to put that expensive rented zoom lens to good use.  I know I’ve always wondered what Jarre’s eyebrows look like from the other end of a telescope.

Wow. I don’t think you could put on a bigger show if you launched the space shuttle from the stage during the song.  And a laser harp?  Jarre could conquer the world from his keyboard with that thing- how do you beat that?  Oh yeah…

Hey, I’m still here! After a furious ending to the quarter, I’m finally enjoying my first real day of Spring Break. Ahh, so nice to get a break, and stroll on the sun-bleached beaches of tropical, exotic Cincinnati. Will have a bunch of posts this week to catch up on some writing, including some great science articles I’ve been reading, and some poetry I’ve really enjoyed. You should see all the blog drafts I started before some vector calculus equation or special relativity equation snagged me! Have some great news as well!

The giant toad who swallowed the disk cluster the 365 Days of Astro webserver has been dredged up, and the site is now back up. You can listen to my latest ramblings about the Kepler Mission at the 365 Days of Astronomy site or in the player below.

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Update: The 365 Days of Astronomy site is back up, and the podcast is available to listen with the player below, or by going to the site itself.

What's that? That's the money you could be saving with NASA.

February is over!  The northern hemisphere will soon begin to thaw due to its changing tilt toward the sun in this part of earth’s orbit, and melting ice and snow will nourish the green life lying dormant in the soil under our feet.  That’s right, the Jolly Green Giant will soon emerge to party Spring Break in Daytona Beach.

March 1st also means that it’s only 5 more days until the scheduled launch of the Kepler Mission!  The beanies of exoplanetoligists, planetary scientists, and astrobiologists everywhere are spinning at 10,000 rpm  in anticipation of what will be a groundbreaking mission for the search for planets and life in the Universe.  The Kepler satellite will monitor 100,000 stars in the constellation of Cygnus for over 3 years for the dimming caused by planets moving in front of stars.  I’ve been looking forward to this mission for so long, not only have I planned to name my firstborn after it, but I was inspired to dedicate today’s 365 Days of Astronomy podcast to talking about this amazing scientific endeavor I had to use a borrowed microphone – apologies for the popping “p”s).

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To give you an idea of how quickly we’re discovering extrasolar planets, my podcast is already out of date.  Since I recorded it just a few days ago, we’re discovered 2 new extrasolar planets, bringing the grand total to 342 (as of this hour, anyway)!  Kepler will quickly bring that total into the thousands.  Also in the last few days since the podcast was recorded, the launch date has slipped to no earlier than March 6.

Kepler will be flying with the largest CCD camera every put into orbit – a 96 megapixel array about the size of an endtable.  Kepler is a long term lightbucket – counting the photons from the same 100,000 stars over 3 years, watching for any change in their brightness.  Watching stars for this long not only lets astronomers see planet transits that will repeat over a periods of time, but also help eliminate light pulses that may be due to other causes, like stellar burping.

As I mention in the podcast, this mission is going to answer one of the the most important questions in astronomy, one around since the times of the ancient Greeks (now that’s a long funding cycle):  How many earth-like planets are out there?  By finding how many there are in this swath of the galaxy, we can quickly scale that to the rest of the galaxy, and indeed to other galaxies as well.  In just over 3 years, we’re gong to know how many earth-like planets there are in the galaxy.  That is spine-tinglingly incredible, and has vast implications on the possible existence of extraterrestrial life and the discovery of even more Baldwin brothers.

I always feel like...someone is watching meee....

NASA Discovers Transiting Nosehair

After listening to the podcast, and perusing the internet for all the information about Kepler, you may have overlooked this little piece of information from NASA’s Kepler website.

In the 1960s, two employees from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) met on a blind date. The couple eventually married and had twin identical boys one of whom has grown up to be the lead for the data analysis group of NASA’s Kepler Mission – Jon Jenkins of NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

Very interseting!  So this begs the inevitable question – who is Jon’s twin brother, and what does he do?  Is he the evil twin, set of to some antithetical job to NASA (maybe he works for a Creationist Space Program)?  Has he asked NASA send Jon to a distant star, returning him so that his age could be compared with his brother’s?

With the sun shining here on a cold Ohio morning, I’ll leave you today with this poem, which was happened to be featured on today’s Writer’s Almanac.

April 5, 1974
by Richard Wilbur

The air was soft, the ground still cold.
In the dull pasture where I strolled
Was something I could not believe.
Dead grass appeared to slide and heave,
Though still too frozen-flat to stir,
And rocks to twitch, and all to blur.
What was this rippling of the land?
Was matter getting out of hand
And making free with natural law?
I stopped and blinked, and then I saw
A fact as eerie as a dream,
There was a subtle flood of steam
Moving upon the face of things.
It came from standing pools and springs
And what of snow was still around;
It came of winter’s giving ground
So that the freeze was coming out,
As when a set mind, blessed by doubt,
Relaxes into mother-wit.
Flowers, I said, will come of it.

Mars and Orion rising over Monument Valley by Wally Pacholka (click to purchase from Wally)

The Night Abraham Called to the Stars
by Robert Bly

Do you remember the night Abraham first saw
The stars? He cried to Saturn: “You are my Lord!”
How happy he was! When he saw the Dawn Star,

He cried, “”You are my Lord!” How destroyed he was
When he watched them set. Friends, he is like us:
We take as our Lord the stars that go down.

We are faithful companions to the unfaithful stars.
We are diggers, like badgers; we love to feel
The dirt flying out from behind our back claws.

And no one can convince us that mud is not
Beautiful. It is our badger soul that thinks so.
We are ready to spend the rest of our life

Walking with muddy shoes in the wet fields.
We resemble exiles in the kingdom of the serpent.
We stand in the onion fields looking up at the night.

My heart is a calm potato by day, and a weeping
Abandoned woman by night. Friend, tell me what to do,
Since I am a man in love with the setting stars.

Hey all! All relativistic dynamics and no play makes Einstein something something, so I’m glad to be able to write!  Because Facebook makes it so very easy to post things, I’ve been posting things there just about every day.  It’s hard to imagine that my time is measured in mouse “clicks” where I have time for one, but not too many.    So be sure to head over there and become my friend.  Also, I’ve been trying to join the Twitter Borg experiment (as seen on the right), that will soon see all of us naming our  kids’ with names beginning with @.

Today is my second day of the 365 Days of Astronomy project, leaving only 363 Days for the rest of humanity.  Sorry about that.  This time, I decided to do something different for an astronomy podcast.  I learned a long time ago that learning and appreciating the Universe is not proportional to the amount of words one uses – some would say it’s actually inversely proportional!  In the planetarium world, I would use visuals and audio to do the speaking, which actually communicates the meaning of a concept or idea to your intellect as much as spoken facts and figures.  But then the music, the sound, and visuals all combine in a sort of spiritual alchemy to speak to an entirely different part of you that you didn’t even know was listening.

So today, with the kind permission of the fantastic musician Cardamar, we take a auditory journey across the light years to the amazing new world of extrasolar planet discovery.  “Exoplanet Remix” features the voices of Drs. Geoff Marcy, Jim Fanson, Pieter Deroo, Pin Chen, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Mark Clampin, Jo Pitesky, Mark Swain, Hook, Frankenstein, Pepper, NASA, ESO, and Mary Estacion.

You can listen with the player below, or click over to the project page itself.

Headphones recommended!  I hope you enjoy it!

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Just popping my head up from my books to pass on this neat-o vide-o.

The Mars Exploration Rovers have been an incredible success, as I’m sure anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock knows. So what will NASA do as a roving encore? Build a car-sized 6-wheelin’ monster truck that will cruise for Martian chicks! Click on the video if you want to feast your eyes on the high-def animation.

One thing – the animation has the Mars rover shooting a laser on distant Mars rocks and vaporizing them. Geez, it’s a little early for an Obama administration preemptive strike don’t you think?  I have to check the instrument, but methinks that it won’t be vaporizing any rocks from that distance, and that the animators went a little crazy with the Jolt Cola and the Twizzlers, and the hey, hey and the GLAVIN!