My Second Published Science Fiction Story Now Available Free On Line

 As some regular readers know, one my recent projects is writing short science fiction stories based on good astronomy. After a long learning period, two of my stories have now been published in science fiction anthologies. The second one, which is about exploding stars and music, just had its rights returned to me, and so I am happy to put it up free on the web for everyone's enjoyment at: 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/310397794_Supernova_Rhythm 

After the short story, I have put a non-technical explanation of the science behind the fiction.

The accompanying photo is a NASA composite showing the remnant of Tycho's Supernova, a star seen to explode by the great astronomer Tycho Brahe in October 1604. In this image, blue and green colors shows what the remnant would look like if you had x-ray eyes, the yellow shows what it looks like in visible light, and the green shows the heat rays (infrared) coming from the object. Blended together, all the colors show where this remarkable "left-over"of a star that blew itself to bits is still glowing brightly more than 400 years later.

By the way, if you also want to read my first published science fiction story "A Cave in Arsia Mons" (about a surprising discovery on Mars), you can do so at: 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282914928_The_Cave_in_Arsia_Mons

A New Selfie from Mars

NASA's InSight lander on Mars has sent back its first "selfie" -- a great mosaic of 11 images, taken by the color camera on the "elbow" of its robotic arm. You can clearly see the round solar panels (7 feet wide) which collect power for the lander, and, between them, the instrument deck for measuring weather, marsquakes, and other conditions on Mars. Eventually, the instrument package nicknamed the mole will try to dig a hole 16 feet deep and see how heat flows inside the red planet. It's terrific to see InSight's systems slowly being tried out and working so well.

Click on the picture to see it larger.

A Photo of the Earth and Moon from Mars!

   NASA has just released a remarkable image of the Earth and the Moon as seen from a spacecraft orbiting Mars. Our planet and Mars were 127 million miles apart when the photo was taken.

   The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting Mars since 2006, collecting very detailed close-up images and data about the surface of the red planet. In this case it was used to capture a photo of Earth and Moon with both bodies in the same frame. The image was taken at a time when the Moon was behind Earth as seen from Mars, so it shows the Earth-facing side of our natural satellite.

   Even at Mars' distance, the image of the Earth reveals continents. Australia is the reddish-brown feature in the center. Seeing ourselves as a tiny disk of light in the blackness of space can help remind us that we share a fragile and beautiful planet in our journey through space.

My Mars Science Fiction Story Now Free on the Web

As some of you know, I have begun writing science fiction stories (based on ideas from astronomy) in recent years and two of them have now been published.

The first story (“The Cave in Arsia Mons”) was published in a small-press anthology of Mars stories entitled “Building Red: Mission Mars,” and deals with a surprising discovery made in a cave on the side of one of the giant volcanoes on the red planet.

The publisher has now given me permission to put the story on-line free and it can be found at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282914928_The_Cave_in_Arsia_Mons
If you click on the blue “download” button just above and to the right of the title, you get a PDF file with the story and a bit about the actual discovery of martian caves.

My second story (“Supernova Rhythm”) is just being published in an anthology entitled “Science Fiction by Scientists,” edited by astronomer Mike Brotherton, and published by Springer. It concerns an advanced civilization out there that can play music using exploding stars:
http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319411019 or
https://www.amazon.com/Science-Fiction-Scienti…/…/3319411012

When I retire from teaching at Foothill College in June 2017, I am looking forward to spending more time writing science fiction stories like this.  For my listing of a wide range of science fiction stories with good astronomy, see: http://www.astrosociety.org/scifi 

Science Fiction and Astronomy

As regular readers of my blog may know, I have a special interest in science fiction, and often recommend stories in my astronomy and physics classes. I even keep a webpage of science fiction stories that use accurate astronomy, at:http://www.astrosociety.org/scifi

Recently, I joined a writing group, and started writing science fiction myself. After receiving many eloquent rejection notes from some of the finest science fiction magazines, one of my stories was published in a small-press anthology about colonizing Mars, called "Building Red," edited by Janet Cannon.

This coming weekend, I will be a guest speaker at BayCon 2016, a science fiction convention in the San Francisco Bay Area (in San Mateo, to be precise.) I have spoken at such conventions before, but this will be my first time speaking not only as an astronomer, but as a science fiction author. The full program and information is on the website:http://baycon.org.  Please say hello if you stop by.

For those of you not in the area, I discussed my story (and scientists who write science fiction) on the syndicated radio show “Big Picture Science” with host Seth Shostak this week. Here is the page:http://bigpicturescience.org/episodes/science-fiction . Note the things in red are links on this page. If you click on the red “Science Fiction” under download, you will be taken to the audio for the show. The interview that mentions my story starts at about 19 minutes into the show and ends at about 30 minutes into the show.

Seth will also be a speaker at BayCon, as will several NASA scientists. I will even be on a panel on scientific science fiction with two of my favorite science fiction authors, Paul Preuss and G. D. Nordley.

For a person whose life has been mostly about teaching the facts of science, it's a lot of fun to be able to speculate in the realm of fiction. So many of my students tell me they were drawn to astronomy by a science fiction story, TV show, or movie they saw; so I know fiction can help draw new audiences toward astronomy. And with the political news the way it is these days, we all need to find ways to take our minds off our home planet and think about the "bigger picture" of the universe.

Mars: Close and Easy to See (And Wet Long Ago)

Tonight, if you look southeast, you can see Mars as a bright red dot next to the full Moon. Mars is in one of its closer positions, about 48 million miles away. Mars is in what astronomers call "opposition" right now (which is not a term related to the Bernie and Hilary situation!)

When Mars is in opposition, it is on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun. This means that when the Sun goes down, Mars comes up in our skies, and Mars will be up all night long. (Looking at our diagram from Sky & Telescope magazine, you should also be able to find Saturn this evening or tomorrow night, lower toward the horizon than Mars.)

In recent weeks, even more evidence has been accumulating that ancient Mars, billions of years ago, had a much thicker atmosphere and water was therefore liquid on its surface. Astronomers now believe that there were once lakes and even perhaps seas on the red planet. Recently, planetary scientists even found what seems like evidence of two episodes of tsunamis that happened on Mars a long time ago, when a big chunk of rock or ice from space hit a larger body of water.

For details of this investigation, see: http://www.psi.edu/news/marstsunami

(Also check out a great new Hubble image of Mars at:
http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1609/ )

My First Science Fiction Story Published

As some of you know, I have long enjoyed science fiction, both as fascinating reading and also as a nice addition to my introductory astronomy classes. For 30 years, I also kept a diary of science fiction ideas that occurred to me, and might make the basis of good stories.

In the last year or two, I have joined a writing group and am trying to create some SF short stories of my own. I have a full bulletin board of eloquent rejection slips from some of the finest science fiction magazines in print (as, I gather, all beginning writers must collect,) But now, one of my stories has been published, in a Mars-theme anthology called "Building Red," from a small independent press in St. Louis called Walrus Publishing (and the book is available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Mission-Mars-Building-Ja…/…/1940442079 )

The story, based on a real discovery about Mars, takes place in part inside a cave on the flanks of one of the four giant volcanoes on Mars' equatorial bulge. Instead of the sanitized, squeaky-clean NASA version of a future Mars colony, I tried to imagine one that's crowded, smelly, and has its share of loners and misfits.

The story is entitled "The Cave in Arsia Mons" and it appears together with Mars stories by a number of writers, some of whom have a longer publishing record in SF than I do.

More generally, for a topical index to science fiction stories that have good astronomy in them, see my web page at: 

http://www.astrosociety.org/scifi 

"The Martian" and Other News of the Solar System

If you've seen, read, or heard about "The Martian" film or novel, you may know that it's a story by an engineer about survival on Mars. If you'd like some background on how author Andy Weir tried to make the story realistic, using known science, check out his talk at NASA's Ames Research Center at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBtXuBuZPpQ

The image accompanying this post is a selfie of a real "martian" -- the Curiosity Rover on Mars, which took the pictures from which this great Mars image was assembled in August. If you click on the picture, you get a bigger version.

For a listing of other Mars science fiction stories with reasonable astronomy, you can download my one-page resource guide at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282505754_Mars_Science_Fiction_with_Reasonable_Science

A fantastic new image and movie of Pluto's giant moon Charon (with its mysterious red polar cap) can now be seen at: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20151001 

For those of you who are in the Northern California area, or have friends there, there are two exciting events coming up this week:

1) Dr. Carolyn Porco, the head of the imaging team for the Cassini mission at Saturn, is giving a free public lecture (with fabulous pictures) at Foothill College Wednesday night: http://www.foothill.edu/news/newsfmt.php?sr=2&rec_id=3852

2) The Astronomical Society of the Pacific and Chabot Space Science Center are sponsoring an all-day Family Astronomy Festival in Oakland Saturday Oct. 10. See: https://www.astrosociety.org/education/asp-annual-meeting/

Astronomers Find a Planet Like Mars in a Distant Star System

A team of astronomers has found the equivalent to planet Mars in a star system with three planets 200 light years away.  This is the planet with the lowest mass found so far around any normal star.  That’s because the methods that allow us to find the masses of planets (how much they weigh) generally work best for planets that are heavier.  Here a wonderful combination of circumstances allowed the team (including Jason Rowe of the SETI Institute) to make their record-breaking measurement.

The nameless star system is given the catalog designation Kepler 138, because the three planets, orbiting a cooler star, were first discovered by the Kepler spacecraft.  Kepler allows astronomers to find planets when they move across the face of their stars, causing a tiny eclipse (or “transit.”)  Tremendously accurate instruments aboard Kepler measured the decrease of light when each planet got in front of the star.

The three planets are each closer to their star than Mercury is to our Sun.  The planet that resembles Mars, closest of the three, takes only 10.3 days to go around.  In other words, a year on that planet is 10 Earth days.  Think how often you’d have to celebrate annual events, like your birthday!

The present team of astronomers (which also includes members from NASA’s Ames Research Center and Penn State) followed the three planets’ transits over time and noticed that they did not occur at the same time each orbit, because the gravity of the other two close planets was tugging on each one.  By measuring the size of the tugs, the astronomers could derive the gravity (mass) of each planet, something that is otherwise very hard to do.

Now here is the clever part.  When we watch a planet go in front of its star, that allows to measure how big the planet is (its diameter).  Bigger planets block more light.   So for these three planets, we now had the mass (from the tugs) and the size (from the transits).  Most of the time, when they find planets around other stars, astronomers only have one OR the other. 

Since we have both in this case, that allows us to calculate the density of each world. If a planet is dense, it is likely to made mostly of rock, like Earth is.  If a planet is not so dense, it combines rock with ice or even perhaps melted ice, such as the liquids we find inside Jupiter and the other partly liquid planets in our solar system.

This is what allowed the team to say with some certainty that the inner planet in the Kepler 138 system is about the size of Mars and about the same composition as Mars.  The planet is roughly 10% the mass of Earth and half the size of Earth, just like Mars is.   This is the smallest world for which we have both size and mass.

Almost 2000 planets are now known around other stars, a remarkable number, given that the first one was discovered just 20 years ago.  What amazes us is the variety of planets out there.   There are huge planets, bigger than Jupiter, but orbiting very close to their stars.  There are planets we are calling super-Earths, that are intermediate in size between Earth and Neptune.  And now we know that there are smaller, solid worlds like Mars.  Some smaller worlds are really close to their stars, like the one around Kepler 138, but others are much further out, like Mars is in our solar system.   Nature likes diversity in astronomical settings, much as she likes it for people.

(For a nice "infographic" about the Kepler 138 system compared with our solar system, see:

http://www.space.com/29690-small-alien-planet-kepler-138b-facts-infographic.html  )

Where Would Bill Gates' Great Granddaughter Go for Her Honeymoon?

Imagine a future when space travel is common-place and you can visit the planets.  What will be the top tourist sights in our solar system?  (This is an activity I like to have my students think about as they get near the end of my introduction to the planets class.)

If you are an astronomy fan, play the game yourself. What would you pick for those once-in-a-lifetime sights that future travelers may want to visit and photograph on a honeymoon trip or graduation journey?  

For those of you who happen to be in Northern California on Saturday evening, June 20th, I will be revealing my favorites in a free public talk on Mt. Tamalpais just north of San Francisco.  (My first-ever outdoor lecture with slides!)

For those elsewhere, I'll give you a sample.  Some of my favorite stops include the 4,000-mile lava channel on Venus (always a good planet for a hot time), the towering Mount Olympus volcano on Mars (three times the height of Mount Everest), the awesome Verona Cliffs on the moon Miranda (which are the tallest “lover’s leap” in the solar system), and the recently discovered steam geysers on Saturn’s intriguing moon Enceladus (nicknamed “Cold Faithful.”)

After the lecture, there will be a laser-guided tour of the night sky by Paul Salazar and stargazing through the telescopes of the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers. This is an OUTDOOR venue, so we ask that people dress appropriately (it can get cold), and bring a flashlight to help find your way to and from the parking lots.

For more details, see: http://wonderfest.org/tourist-in-solar-system/ 

Admission is free, but seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. 

For maps and directions, see: http://friendsofmttam.org/astronomy/directions-and-contact-information.html

If it looks like rain, please call the Mt. Tam hotline at 415-455-5370, after 4 pm.  Since this is an outdoor event, it gets canceled if it is raining.

Our photo shows Saturn casting a shadow on its own sunlit rings in a view from the Cassini spacecraft.

Mars Rover Sees Rock Spire as It Reaches 4000th Martian Day Record

At the end of April, the Opportunity Rover on Mars reached its 4000th martian day of operations! (A day on Mars is 24 hours and 40 minutes long.) Opportunity has been exploring the planets since early in 2004, and has survived far longer than most scientists and engineers expected.

Our photo shows a beautiful image mosaic it took of the red deserts of Mars, focusing on an elongated crater (seen a bit darker than the surrounding countryside) called "Spirit of St. Louis."

If you click on the picture, you can see it bigger. The crater is about 110 feet long and the interesting rock spire on its far end is about 7 to 10 feet high.

The Spirit of St. Louis crater is on the outer part of the western rim of a much larger crater that Opportunity has been exploring, called Endeavour. You have a view into that bigger crater if you look on either side of the rock spire.

(If the names in this story are not your favorites, you are not alone. Not everyone loves the NASA designations; I think not even Donald Trump would name his child Opportunity, but what are you going to do.)

Mars is every bit as dry and dusty as you might imagine from this picture. The energy for the stalwart little rover comes from its solar panels, and over the years they have become covered with dust. Each time, we thought this spelled the end of the mission, but then the martian winds whipped up a dust devil, which cleaned the solar panels and gave the rover fresh life. Planetary exploration is full of surprises.

****

For a different view, from a different robotic explorer, check out the small but fascinating mineral veins, seen by the Curiosity Rover in March, at: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/figures/PIA19161_fig1.jpg
The mineral rows we see are only about 2.5 inches high, but wonderfully complex.  By the way, this picture has been edited to change the martian light slightly to be more like Earth light, so geologists could compare the mineral deposits to more familiar ones on Earth. The picture you see is a combination of 28 telephoto lens images.  Aren't they wonderfully sharp?

Speaking of Sharp, Curiosity is now making its way toward and up Mt. Sharp, the layered mountain inside a crater which we think was under water billions of years ago. We expect lots of great images as Curiosity makes its slow and careful trek up the mountain.

The Lake that Built a Mountain on Mars

NASA’s instrument-laden Curiosity Rover is now at the foot of Mt. Sharp, its ultimate target on Mars. New results from the rover have confirmed and filled in our ideas about what the 3-mile high mountain is doing in the middle of 96-mile wide Gale Crater. And, most important, the new observations give us even more confidence in the notion that ancient Mars was very different from Mars today – it may well have had a much thicker atmosphere, flowing rivers, and occasionally full lakes of water.

Mt. Sharp is an interesting mountain, in that it seems to be built up out of layer after layer of sediment. This material might have been carried to the center of the crater by either water or winds, scientists thought. The new results indicate that both water and wind may have had a role in building Mt. Sharp over the millennia.

We already knew that one or more dry river channels end at Gale Crater, making it likely that long ago, water probably flowed into the crater. Over long periods of time, the crater lake may have formed and evaporated again and again. Rivers flowing over the red sands of Mars would have carried quite a bit of sediment into the crater and would have deposited this material in its center. As the central mountain began to accumulate, the next river flood would lap up against it. The resulting waves could carry material higher than the river’s original level, thus building up the mountain further.

When the lake was dry, the big wind storms, that other instruments have shown us are a regular feature of Mars weather, could have added wind blown sand to the top of the mountain. So Mt. Sharp could have grown during both wet and dry periods.

Curiosity is only at the bottom of the mountain right now, but it has the ability to climb up to higher layers over the coming months. Scientists are very interested in what the layers higher up might reveal to us about how Mt. Sharp grew and how the climate on ancient Mars changed as time passed.

Our top picture, taken on Mars on Nov. 2, shows some of the layers building up at the bottom of Mt. Sharp in a formation scientists have nicknamed "Whale Rock." For a version of this picture that shows scale, see: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/figures/PIA19081_fig1.jpg 

The picture below is an earlier "selfie" that the Curiosity rover took showing its instruments and cameras at work. Click on either photo and you'll see a larger version, full of amazing detail -- straight from the surface of Mars!

A Comet Passes by Mars; An Eclipse of the Sun

 

On Thursday afternoon, Oct. 23, there will be a partial eclipse of the Sun, visible from the U.S. Different amounts of the Sun's area will be covered by the Sun. (For example, 40% of the Sun will be covered from the San Francisco region.) I have put question-and-answer introductions to the eclipse at: http://www.astrosociety.org/society-news/2014-eclipse-fact-sheets/

You can consult the national sheet for the degree the Sun will be eclipsed in your area. Here's wishing everyone clear skies. And please remember, do NOT look at the Sun without proper protection. Follow the instructions on the sheets or go to an astronomy place (observatory, college, planetarium) near you to join an eclipse viewing session.

This Sunday, Oct. 19th, a comet will pass closer to Mars, than any comet has passed to the Earth in recorded history. Comet Siding Spring (named after the observatory where it was discovered) will pass within only 87,000 miles of Mars. An armada of telescopes near Mars and Earth will try to get a good glimpse of it. From its orbit, this appears to be what you might call a "virgin" comet, making its first entry to the inner solar system. It is coming from the distant reservoir of ancient "icy chunks" that surround our solar system in a giant cloud.

A comet is just such an icy chunk that comes close enough to the Sun so that the Sun's energy and wind begin to evaporate the ice and loosen the dust frozen inside it for billions of years. These comets thus contain some of the original material from which our solar system was formed some 5 billion years ago. 

To learn more about NASA's plans for observing this Mars visitor, see: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/09oct_cometprep/

For a while, NASA scientists worried that dust from the comet may damage some of the spacecraft around Mars, but recent calculations are showing that the path the comet is taking means that its dust is not likely to pose a serious threat.  But we'll see Sunday.  Perhaps there will be faint "shooting stars" (dust burning up in the thin atmosphere) on Mars.

Happy Fall Equinox on Monday and Other Sky Events

Monday morning (Sept. 22) is the "autumnal" or fall equinox for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. On that day, the length of the day and the night are roughly the same ("equinox" means equal night). We are moving from the summer, when the days were longer, toward the winter when our nights are longer -- and our parts of the planet have fewer hours to heat up from sunlight.

The equinox is sometimes called the official start of fall and throughout history there have been festivals and beginnings celebrated at the time. It so happens that Foothill College, where I teach, starts its fall quarter on the equinox this year, so I will be welcoming several hundred new students to my classes with a happy equinox greeting (and many who don't know the term will be looking at me as if I were a crazy person!)

The fall quarter will bring many interesting events to fans of astronomy. Tonight, Sunday, the MAVEN spacecraft will be inserted into orbit around Mars, so it can begin to study how little Mars, with its lower gravity, lost its atmosphere over the millennia, and how its remaining air layers interact with the radiation and wind from the Sun.

October 8th, we will have a total eclipse of the Moon (these are much more common than total eclipses of the Sun.) Alas, for those of us in North America, this will be a middle of the night eclipse! The full Moon will go dark as the Earth's shadow falls on it, but most of us will be in bed, deeply asleep, when it happens. For example, in San Francisco, the eclipse happens from about 2:30 am to 5:30 am, so only dedicated night owls will be watching it. (If you miss it, don't worry, there will be two lunar eclipses visible in 2015.)

On October 19th, a newly discovered comet will come closer to the planet Mars than any known comet has come to Earth, and so our robot "representatives" around Mars will be keeping their cameras out for that pass.

On October 23rd, in the afternoon, much of North America will witness a partial eclipse of the Sun in the afternoon. Many astronomy organizations will be planning eclipse parties, with safe viewing options. I will do a full post about the eclipse when we get closer to the time.

And, down on Earth, October 25th, the opening day of the 2014 Bay Area Science Festival, I will be giving a free public talk on Mt. Tamalpais about the "Top Tourist Sights of the Solar System: Where Bill Gates' Great-Granddaughter will go for Her Honeymoon." See: http://wonderfest.org/top-tourist-signs-of-the-solar-system/

An Eclipse of the Sun from Mars

Our Moon is not the only astronomical body that can eclipse the Sun. In August of last year, the cameras aboard the Curiosity rover on Mars caught one of the little moons of Mars, Phobos, making an eclipse.

In the photo, you can see Phobos go across the face of the Sun. Note that the moon's shape is that of a potato (not a sphere).

Phobos is really a small moon (we believe it's an asteroid that Mars captured long ago) -- it is only about 16 miles wide in its longest dimension. The reason it covers so much of the Sun in the picture is that it orbits very close to Mars. It's only 3700 miles above the surface of the red planet.  (Compare that to the 240,000-mile distance of our own Moon!)

If you stood on the surface of Mars, Phobos would be a dim light in the night sky, rising in the west and setting in the east, and taking about 4 hours to go from horizon to horizon. (In other words, Phobos orbits Mars faster than Mars spins or rotates!)

The three black and white images of Phobos crossing the Sun were taken on Aug. 21, 2013 three seconds apart. Not a bad feat of photography by the team running the rover on its mission in Gale crater!


If you want to see Phobos better, below is a remarkable close-up photo of the little moon, taken with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, and photo processed to make the color differences more intense:

I was reminded of eclipses because I've just come back from an astronomy meeting where we discussed another August eclipse. In August 2017, our Moon will eclipse the Sun completely. The total eclipse will be visible in only one country -- the United States -- and in a band only 150 miles or so wide. Everyone else in North America will see a "partial eclipse" -- a nice bite taken out of the Sun. We estimate that 500 million people will be able to see the partial eclipse. This could become one of the most dramatic opportunities and challenges for astronomy education in our time. But we'll talk more about that in future blog posts, as the time gets closer.

A Fresh Crater Seen on Mars

The solar system is a violent place, with lots of hitting going on. Small chunks of rock and ice (left over from the formation of the planets) continue to move around the Sun and among its many worlds. When a chunk hits a planet, the pull of the planet's gravity brings the chunk in so fast, it explodes on impact, carving out a nice round crater.

We have several spacecraft orbiting and monitoring the planet Mars from above. One of them, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, recently showed astronomers that a fresh crater about 100 feet (30 meters) in diameter had formed near Mars' equator sometime between 2010 and 2012. In the enhanced-color view I am sharing here, the crater looks blue because the explosion has removed a lot of the red surface dust that makes Mars the "red planet."

Careful studies of this beautiful picture have shown that the explosion of the incoming rock fragment threw material outward on Mars for more than 9 miles in all directions. You can see the magnificent dark rays of explosive material that scarred the surface when the blast happened.

New craters are being made by such impacts pretty regularly on Mars and other worlds, but it's nice to get such a detailed and recent picture from the so-called HI-RISE camera in orbit -- one of our most sophisticated instruments observing Mars.

Music Inspired by Astronomy

I just got back from a fascinating conference in New York on how astronomy has inspired other fields, like art, architecture, poetry, and music over the years. I was the after-dinner entertainmen...I mean...the banquet speaker and had a chance to share the results of my 30-plus years of collecting examples of astronomical music (assembled with the help of many generations of students).

Composers of both classical and popular music have long been inspired by the ideas and discoveries of astronomy. The picture with this post, for example, shows some sheet music from 1901 that was inspired by physicist (and inventor) Nikola Tesla's claim that his early radio equipment had intercepted signals from our neighbor planet Mars. Actually they turned out to be perfectly natural radio waves from the upper layers of the Earth atmosphere, but for a while the news media were touting the idea that martians might be signaling us.

If you want to see my full list of 133 "astronomy music" pieces that you can find on CD, it's at:http://aer.aas.org/resource/1/aerscz/v11/i1/p010303_s1?view=fulltext

With the growth of videos on YouTube and other web sites, you can actually watch some of these pieces being performed. Among my popular-music favorites on video are:

1) "Walking on the Moon" by the Police (comparing the feeling of being in love to being on the Moon's surface):http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPpvHEsC_PM

2) "Hawking" by Todd Rundgren (which tries to put the listener in the body and mind of brilliant but wheelchair-bound physicist Stephen Hawking): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk7uZO1iED8

3) "Why the Sun Really Shines" by They Might Be Giants (a children's song): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-KyciKHw-g

4) And, for a change of pace, the "Elements" song by 1960's humorist (and math professor) Tom Lehrer:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcS3NOQnsQM

A number of brave composers have put together musical pieces that are based on the rhythms or tones of actual astronomical observations. There is music based on radio signals from galaxies, on the index of how the Sun affects the Earth's magnetic field, and on the speed with which the planets orbit the Sun. A fun recent example is "Supernova Sonata" -- music based on a catalog of newly discovered exploding stars in other galaxies:http://vimeo.com/23927216

I have enjoyed collecting these musical examples of the power of astronomy to affect our imaginations and hope you enjoy hearing some of them.

Making Yourself at Home on Mars

One of the most interesting results of NASA's policy to make its planetary images widely and freely available is that talented photographers around the world have combined and extended the photos to make clearer or wider views of what it's like to be on another world.

A wonderful example can be found at a site for panoramic (360-degree) images, where photographer Andrew Bodrov has made one of the most exciting space images I have yet seen:
http://www.360cities.net/image/mars-gigapixel-panorama-curiosity-solar-days-136-149#-410.49,13.54,42.5

Bodrov stitched together 407 different images from two different cameras aboard the Curiosity rover on the red planet Mars. You can see the rover itself and the "Yellowknife Bay" neighborhood that it was exploring at the time that it did the first experiment drilling into a Mars rock. The large mountain in the distance is Mt. Sharp, the rover's ultimate destination.

I encourage you to play with the image for a while. There are controls at the upper left to help you move around and your cursor also gives you control of the speed and direction with which you move through this rich image. Enjoy the details of the rover's machinery and the wide range of rock formations around the little robot visitor.

Streaking on Mars (and "Spiders" Too)

Sometimes pictures from other planets are so intriguing, you almost have to stop your eyes from making snap judgments.  What do you see on the above image from the north pole region of Mars?

It almost looks like some sort of weird plant growth, doesn't it?  But it's NOT!!! Nothing like plants could grow in the thin atmosphere of Mars, with relentless and deadly ultraviolet light from the Sun beating down on the dry surface.

What we are seeing here are streaks of darker sand rolling down the incline of pinkish sand dunes.  This was taken during the spring, when warming temperatures on Mars evaporate the dry-ice coating (white color) and free the darker sand to fall down hill.   Look carefully -- none of those tall dark "plants" show a shadow!  To give you a sense of scale, this picture is about 1 kilometer (a little more than half a mile) across.

But what a wonderfully eerie picture those streaks of dark sand make across the martian landscape.  You can already hear the "conspiracy theorists" saying that NASA is hiding the news of dark trees growing on Mars!  The image, by the way, is from the wonderful  HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft.

Something similar can be seen, if you check out the following summertime image from Mars' south pole region:

Here all the dry-ice (carbon dioxide) frost has evaporated -- that's what happens in summer.  Where the frozen dry-ice is trapped underground, and then makes its way to the surface, it can leave grooves in the ground -- all aimed toward the central point where the gas finally built up enough pressure to escape.  Seen from above, these features look like spiders.  They are actually channels etched into the surface about 3 to 7 feet deep.

This spidery scene is about 3/4 of a mile across.  HiRISE took this one too.  Will someone in Hollywood soon be making a movie about giant spiders on Mars?

Curiosity Mars Rover Takes a Self-Portrait

At the beginning of November, the Curiosity rover on Mars used a camera on its big arm to take this wonderful panoramic picture of itself and its surroundings. Dozens of individual pictures were stitched together carefully to make this self-portrait. 

You can see four little trenches in the front where the arm scooped up some martian dirt for analysis.

Curiously, the way the images are taken and assembled, the arm is NOT visible in the picture. (You could imagine something similar if you held a camera out way in front of you and then took pictures from all sides. You could crop and assemble those pictures in a way so that your arm is always out of sight on the final image.)

In the background, on the upper right, you can see Mount Sharp, the mountain in the center of Gale Crater, which is the rover's ultimate destination. (See my blog post of August 19, 2012 for more on this mountain and its location.)

So far, all the instruments on board Curiosity are working fine, and the mission -- one of the most exciting astronomy events of the past year -- is continuing to send back good information from our red neighbor planet. As expected, we are already seeing clear evidence that there was lots of flowing water on Mars in the distant past.

P.S. If you are interested, you can see an animation of how this complex picture was taken and put together at:
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=156880341