Summer Solstice Blues Averted!

The summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere occurred a couple of days ago on June 21 -- longest day of the year here, and of course for the Southern Hemisphere, the shortest. I always feel a twinge on June 21, because the nights start getting longer again. But this year, I had something new to think about -- in the lead up to June 21, a number of people sent me the following e-mail:

Please watch this on 21st June

SHARE THIS WITH YOUR FRIENDS, AS NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE IT AGAIN. Two Suns on 21th June 2010

21st June - the Whole World is waiting for.............

Star Aderoid will be the brightest in the sky, starting 10 June. It will look as large as the sun from naked eye. This will culminate on 21stjune when the star comes within 34.65M miles of the earth. Be sure to watch the sky on june. 21 at 12:30 pm. It will look like the earth has 2 suns.!!

The next time Aderoid may come this close is in 2287

The e-mail came with a photo:

The photo itself seems to have been inspired by the sunset on Tatooine sequence in the first-ever Star Wars movie (Episode 4 - A New Hope). It is, as you might expect, a product of the photoshopper's art, and not at all based ion reality. (Did you see two suns in the sky on June 21, or on any of the 11 days leading up to it??) The HTML in the e-mail has embedded text which reads "Fun & Info @ Keralites.net". Keralites.net actually exists, and appears to be a site promoting the state of Kerala, which is in India. Clicking on a couple of links led to dead ends, so it doesn't look like keralites.net has any significant content that I want to be looking for.

Notwithstanding the fact that I received this e-mail from respected sources, the content is total crap. (You really didn't see two suns in the sky on June 21, did you??)

What I find interesting is that people who are knowledgeable and canny are still taken in by junk like this, probably because the sky and astronomical matters in general are increasingly foreign to urban people.

Snopes, as usual, was right on top of this one. The following snippet is my favourite piece of their article:

An object as large as a star approaching the Earth would not suddenly appear at a particular hour of a given day and then be gone; if would be visible over an extended period of time.

If a star were truly about to pass within 35 million miles of Earth, the preparations we'd be undertaking would be to get ready to meet our makers and not to marvel at the beauty of the phenomenon, as the results would be catastrophic. By way of comparison, the Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun, while the planet Mercury orbits the Sun at an average distance of 36 million miles. If a star comparable to our Sun were to travel within 34.65 million miles of the Earth, our planet would quickly become like Mercury: a barren, lifeless, deep-fried hunk of rock.

The disconnect with the night sky in the majority of people in our modern society can likely be attributable, at least in part, to artificial lighting which makes it impossible for us to see the sky clearly at night.

But, whatever the source of the disconnect, one consequence of it is that nonsense like the "Aderoid" story gets circulated. And even more egregiously, the seeds are sown for the credulous to be taken in by more dangerous nonsense like Zecharia Sitchin's modern attempt to revive the lunacy of Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Daniken. Sitchin's books are likely one of the elements driving the belief in an apocalypse in 2012, a belief sufficiently widespread that NASA felt compelled to put up an educational web page about it.

This year, I spent a quiet summer solstice with my family, under a sky with only one sun. Nothing potentially world ending happened, unless you count my inability to locate my favourite chip dip.

Volcanic Plume from Iceland

NASA's Terra and Aqua spacecraft, both in "ball of yarn" polar orbits, carry a detector called MODIS. On April 15, the Terra spacecraft used its onboard MODIS instrument to capture the following image of a volcanic plume from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in southern Iceland.



In the photo, the Shetland Islands are at the photo's lower right corner.

In southern Iceland, the glacier over top of the volcano caused the upwelling lava to cool very quickly, forming a silica glass which fragmented into fine particles, and which in turn were carried into the atmosphere by the eruption plume.

The height of the plume occupies the normal range of cruise altitudes for commercial airliners. The presence of the the fine, sharp, jagged, abrasive silica particles in the volcanic ash cloud would cause engine failure if the material were sucked into an intake turbine. For this reason, air travel over most of northern Europe was cancelled for the day, and likely over the coming weekend.

Not since the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001 has there been such a large disruption in air travel.

UPDATE - The Astronomy Picture of the Day website has a great picture of the volcano for their April 19 entry.

Earthquake in Chile

A massive earthquake, magnitude 8.8 on the Richter scale, hit Chile on Saturday morning. (LINK to USGS summary).


View Chile earthquake in a larger map

As of this writing, Chile has not requested international aid. Unlike Haiti, Chile is more developed, and has more infrastructure to be able to deal with this event, which nonetheless has been described by the Chilean government as a "catastrophe".



Despite initial, obviously satirical reports, Pat Robertson has not made any statement as to the cause of the Chilean earthquake, now known to be the 8th most intense earthquake in recorded history.

UPDATE - I have heard radio commentary that describes the Chilean earthquake as the fifth, and not the eighth largest ever recorded. More than 500 times the energy of the Haitian earthquake was released. Some deaths occurred due to a tsunami generated by the initial event. Chile contains important sites for astronomical research (where SN1987A was discovered, for instance) including the Las Campanas site where the University of Toronto and other institutions maintain facilities. It is not know what effect, if any, the earthquake has had on telescopes and related hardware.

Operation HESTIA

The Canadian military is going to Haiti to assist in relief efforts. This deployment is part of what is being described as a whole-of-government response by Canada that also involves Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (DFAIT) as well as the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

The military response, designated Operation HESTIA, includes the destroyer HMCS Athabaskan and frigate HMCS Halifax, both expected to arrive in Haiti today, after sailing from Halifax Harbour last Thursday. Both ships are packed with relief supplies, including the result of a clothing and toy drive among the crews (scroll down when the link opens). The ships will likely anchor off the south coast, since there is a growing mass of maritime traffic in the harbour of the capital, Port Au Prince.

The Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) has been on the ground since last week. DART equipment is maintained on standby at CFB Trenton in order to ensure proximity to the global reach provided by 8 Wing's Hercules and Globemaster transports. DART's primary mission is to provide medical care and to ensure a safe supply of drinking water.

The 200 members of the DART unit will be supplemented by 500 sailors and specialists from Athabaskan and Halifax. There are an additional 1,000 Canadian Forces soldiers who will be sent shortly. Their combined mission will be to provide aid, and to assist the civil authorities in keeping order.

Current casualty estimates place the number dead in Haiti as high as 200,000 people, with an additional 300,000 made homeless. The death and devastation has been staggering, placing this disaster on the same scale as a war.

The Devil and the Jackal

Trust Fred Clark at Slacktivist to properly dissect and shed light on the true evil of Pat Robertson's utterances. Mr. Clark's post contains some important thoughts which bear repeating:

I'm accustomed to Pat Robertson being an unholy fool, but his remarks following the Haitian earthquake were astonishing even for him. By attributing Haiti's suffering to a supposed "pact with the devil," he manages to break two commandments simultaneously -- both bearing false witness against his neighbor and taking the name of God in vain.

That sort of double word score is typical Robertson fare, until one appreciates how utterly and explicitly he takes sides here. By labeling the revolutionary enslaved people who founded the Haitian democracy as literally demonic, Robertson sides with slave owners and against democracy, liberty and human rights. He declares that he and his god are on the side of oppression and that liberation is the Devil's work.

Wow. That this is contrary to the Bible Robertson claims to read is obvious to every tourist who has ever filed past the Liberty Bell here in Philly ("Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof").

But it's worse than that. He's not just contradicting some bit of scriptural arcana here, he's cutting to the core of Christianity and setting himself in direct opposition to it.

Video: On the following two videos, Rachel Maddow does an introduction to this topic, and in the second, Raymond Joseph, the Haitian Ambassador to the United States makes some remarks that provide a pointed reminder that one should never piss off someone who understands history.





If Robertson is the devil of the piece, then the jackal is surely Rush Limbaugh, the drug-addled radio personality who has come to represent the not-so-pent-up hatred of America's bigots. In the following video, Keith Olbermann comments on statements made by both Robertson and Limbaugh:



A day later, Olbermann responds again to a fresh outrage from Limbaugh, this one also drawing a sharp reprimand from Roger Ebert which begins "You should be horse-whipped for the insult you have paid to the highest office of our nation." The Olbermann video follows:



As noted, Haiti's need is great. Donations can be made through the Canadian Red Cross, International Red Cross, MedecinssSans Frontieres, or other charity of your choice4

Haiti, Hell, and Devils

A day before the January 13 Earth flyby of 2010 AL30, some tectonic rebalancing was happening beneath the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. The nation of Haiti occupies the western part of this island, and the quake occurred 25 km from the capital city, Port Au Prince at a depth of 13 kilometers. The consequence of that geological twitch was a Richter 7 earthquake, and the human devastation has been unimaginable -- current estimates place the death toll as high as 100,000 people. If that is indeed the case, that is nearly three times the total number of Canadians killed in World War Two. Or 40 times the number of people killed in New York City on 9/11.

Relief efforts began mobilizing as soon as the news got out. Both the Canadian Red Cross and the International Red Cross have been accepting donations, and three days later, there are groups on the ground delivering aid. Much more is needed.

Pat Robertson, an American televangelist, on the religious television program The 700 Club stated that Haiti and Haitians were "cursed by one thing after another" since they "swore a pact to the devil", a reference to the slave revolt which began in 1791. Robertson, as one of America's privileged elites, potentially descended from slaveholders, would of course have little sympathy for a populist uprising, particularly one where, in the words of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide

To free themselves from the bonds of slavery,
our forefathers turned to the Ancestors in the
ceremony of Bois Caïman, in August 1791. In
other words, to become free, the slaves prayed
not to the God of his master but to the God
of Ancestors.

Any rejection of the god of Pat Robertson seems like a good idea to me, so it must have been a no-brainer for men and women desperate to throw off the shackles of real oppression and slavery for which someone like Robertson would have no understanding, and clearly even less sympathy.

Robertson's statement was described as "stupid" by the American government, and viewed with contempt and amusement in France.

In the blogosphere, P. Z. Meyers (who is much admired in these parts) said it best in his own post on the subject of Robertson's "pact with the devil" remarks: "If it makes you angry, turn your outrage into something constructive and use it to motivate you to donate to Haitian relief first. Deal with the evil scumbag Robertson later."

There is no need to believe in a devil, but there is ample reason to believe in Pat Robertson, and to take a stand against all that he represents. Haiti will be hell for months and years to come, but donations to the relief effort will be our way to help the Haitian people despite Robertson and those devils like him who seek to exploit this little bit of hell on Earth.

To Haitian friends and colleagues, we hope that your families and loved ones are safe. We wish we could do more.