Category: astronomy and cosmology

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 3, 2024 • 8:15 am

James Blilie sent in some photos of the Aurora that his son Jamie took in Washington State.  (I wish I could have seen this!)  His captions are indented, and you can enlarge his son’s photos by clicking on them.

It’s been a couple of weeks since the big Aurora event; but I thought I’d send a selection of my son Jamie’s photos from that night.  I took a few (poor) photos with my iPhone; but mainly I just sat and watched the amazing light show.  Mainly we just gaped and kept up a patter of “holy cow!’ and “holy s**t!”.

The Aurora show of 10-May-2024 was certainly worth staying up for!

I thought I’d seen some pretty spectacular Auroras in Alaska, Canada, and far northern Minnesota. Last night’s event put them all in the shade. It was an event different nearly in kind.   We are fortunate to live in a dark, rural area with little light pollution.

At its peak, it filled the entire northern sky, east to west, horizon to zenith. I’ve never seen anything like it. At times it was apparent that the lights were directly overhead (we are in far southern Washington state; 45° 45’ north).  It was so bright it illuminated the ground, blanked out all but the brightest stars, and put the light of the poor little moon to shame.

The colors were not this intense to the naked eye; the camera picks up more color than the eye. The camera sensor also discerns the “structure” of the lights better than the naked eye. But, make no mistake: this was a spectacular Aurora event.

Equipment:
Nikon D5600 camera
Opteka 6.5mm f/3.5 Ultra Wide Angle Aspherical Manual Focus Fisheye Lens
Sturdy Manfrotto tripod
Adjustments in Lightroom 5 software

Readers’ wildlife photos

March 20, 2024 • 8:15 am

Today we have a batch of cool astronomy photos from reader Chris Taylor. Chris’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.  His captions are very good, and I highly recommend enlarging the photos to see things like nascent comet tails and the moons of Jupiter, which are very clear in the enlarged photo but harder to see on this post itself.

Not exactly wildlife, but I hope these might be of interest. All of these photos were taken by me from my own property, apart from the first one.

Starting off with our own galaxy, which we see as the Milky Way. Having lived in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, I have to say that the part visible from the south is much more impressive than the north, so I will show some of the highlights.

The first photo is looking south across the water of the Coorong, a long coastal lagoon on the east of the Great Australian Bight. The Milky Way is visible right down to the horizon. The brightest star in the middle of the photo is Alpha Centauri. This, together with its near neighbour Beta Centauri, form the pointers to the Southern Cross, Crux.  The long axis of the cross points towards the southern celestial pole, which is out of the frame of this picture.

Taken from my own backyard, the next photo is a closer look at the Milky Way in Centaurus and Crux. Alpha and Beta Centauri are at the bottom right of the frame, with the Southern Cross to the right of centre.  Easily visible in this shot is the Coalsack, a dark nebula where dust is obscuring the light from more distant stars. In indigenous culture, the dark areas of the sky formed constellations as well as the bright stars. In some groups, the Coalsack was the head of an Emu in the sky, but in others it was the head of a hunter. Also visible as a bright fuzzy star at the bottom left of centre is the globular cluster Omega Centauri.

Focusing more closely on the constellation Crux, the Southern Cross now, this photo shows the constellation in more detail. The Coalsack is at the bottom, with the brightest star Acrux at the edge of the dark area. There are another four bright stars that make up the kite shape of the cross, and which are represented on the Australian flag.  At the bottom of the photo is what appears to be another bright star. To the naked eye this seems rather dimmer, and it was given the designation kappa Crucis. But it is in fact a cluster of about 100 young hot giant stars.  When its true nature was realised, it was given a new name, the Jewel Box cluster. It is a beautiful sight in a telescope.

Seen from my home latitude, the centre of our galaxy passes straight overhead at times.  This next photo shows the Milky Way in the constellations of Scorpius and part of Sagittarius. Once again, alpha Centauri is visible as the bright star just over the roof of the house. Below and right of centre is the bright red star Antares. The Milky Way is very wide and bright in this direction and is crossed and split by many dark lanes of dust, but there are also many bright clusters of stars.

A closer look into this region of the sky shows some of the clusters and nebulae. On the left side of the frame are the bright stars of the “tail” of Scorpius, and left of centre are two open clusters named Messier 6 and 7 (M6 and M7).  These were catalogued by the french astronomer Charles Messier in 1780s who was searching for comets, but made a catalogue of objects that could be mistaken for a comet. M6 is the brighter spot left of centre. It is a cluster of about 150 hot blue stars, plus one red one.  The colours of the stars can just be made out. M7 is smaller and fainter below centre. On the right are two areas of nebulosity.  The brightest one can be seen as a fuzzy spot surrounding a number of blue stars.  This is the Lagoon Nebula, M8, a giant cloud of interstellar gas and dust shining by reflected light from the stars embedded within the nebula.  It is in the region of 5000 light years from earth. Close by is M20, the Trifid nebula.  These nebulae are areas where stars are forming from the hydrogen gas making up the clouds.

The last picture of the Milky Way is centred on the eta Carina nebula, as it rises over the corner of my house. Eta Carinae is a binary system of two (possibly more) stars. The primary is one of the most massive and most luminous stars known; it has a mass of over 100 times that of the sun, while its luminosity is as much as 4 million times the Sun’s.

Our galaxy is accompanied by a number of smaller, satellite objects.  This includes the two Magellanic Clouds. These are named for the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who referenced them in his writings, although he was not even the first European to describe them. From my home, the clouds are easily visible, looking like spots of the milky way that have become detached. In fact, they are dwarf galaxies in their own right. The Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of all the satellites, and it is now classed as a Barred Spiral; the bar and at least one spiral arm can be seen in this photo. It is about 160,000 light years from Earth. The bright spot at the centre is the Tarantula Nebula, an enormous area of active star formation.

Also satellites of our galaxy are the Globular Clusters. Globular clusters are collections of anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of stars that are packed into a dense spherical agglomeration due to their mutual gravity. These clusters are then able to orbit the centre of the galaxy as a single unit. Omega Centauri, which we saw in a previous photo, is the brightest one visible from earth. Messier 15 is another of the clusters catalogued by Charles Messier in the 1740s. This one is in the constellation of Pegasus and being away from the plane of our galaxy has many fewer stars close by. In my photograph the individual stars that make up the cluster – there are well over 100,000 – are not individually, but form a fuzzy halo around the central condensation of the cluster.

Moving closer to home, here are some photographs of objects in our own Solar System. The first ones were taken on 01 May 2022. Before dawn on that day, I got up to record the close conjunction of the two brightest planets in the sky, Jupiter and Venus as they appeared only 0.2 degrees apart – half the diameter of the Moon. The pair made an incredible sight, far outshining anything else in the sky as they rose over the hills to the east of my place.

But also on this day was another event – five of the planets were visible in a line in the eastern sky. At the bottom are Jupiter and Venus, higher up towards the centre is Saturn and the red planet Mars in at the top of the frame. The fifth one was Neptune, halfway between the bright planets and Saturn. But it is just visible on the photo as a couple of blue pixels, you have to look really hard to find it!

The last photo is zoomed in to Jupiter and Venus.  Three of the Jovian moons are visible, at the top is Callisto, closer to the planet is Io, and on the other side is Europa.

I also managed to photograph two of the wandering comets. First is Comet C/2021 A1 aka Comet Leonard. This photograph was taken in January 2022 when the comet had already passed the closest to the Sun in its orbit, and a long though quite dim tail had developed. This comet was found to have had a hyperbolic orbit, which meant that the orbit was open and the comet would never return to the inner solar system. As it happened, it never got that far out from the Sun. As it rushed through past the inner planets, the nucleus of the comet broke up, and with the heat from the Sun evaporating more of the ice and other volatile material, the comet vanished from view in March 2022.

Another reasonably bright was Comet C/2022 E3 or Comet ZTF. On the morning of 11 Feb 2023, it passed between the Earth and Mars, when I was able to record the event.  Mars is the reddish blob at the top of the frame, very overexposed, while the comet is bottom centre. There is a small tail forming around the core of the comet which appears green in this photo. That green colour was the result of Carbon C2 molecules evaporating off the surface of the nucleus. As the sunlight energises the molecules, they emit light at this frequency, which gives the characteristic colour.

Ideology sucks another scientific field down the drain

April 9, 2023 • 11:15 am

Several readers sent me a link to a Quillette piece by physicist Lawrence Krauss.  It adds another field—astrobiology, the search for extraterrestrial life—to the many (indeed all) scientific fields that have been corrupted by “progressive” ideology.  In fact, astrobiology has gotten so badly infected that it’s now difficult to do any science at all. Click the screenshot below to read his piece:

Krauss sees the high point of the field in the 1990s when the head of NASA called for more biologists to start looking for extraterrestrial life. Since then, he argues, that despite our increasing knowledge about the universe and technical sophistication, astrobiology hasn’t advanced much. His explanation:

. . . why on Earth, or, rather, why in the Milky Way would I cast any aspersions on this emerging field of science? The problem is that it is an emerging field, and that implies three important things: (1) the development and use of rigorous scientific standards characteristic of more mature fields has not yet been universally established; (2) unfounded claims are too often made, and they gain support in the popular press; and (3) small groups of ideologically driven researchers can have, and have had, an inordinately large impact, hindering progress and potentially pushing the field backwards.

He describes several early claims—including evidence for microbes in meteorites from Mars and a new type of DNA that implied life had two independent origins—that proved to be wrong. This supports points (1) and (2) above, In the rest of the article, Krauss expatiates on claim (3): the malign influence of ideology on the field. Here are a few bits of ideology that are holding back the field (Krauss’s prose is indented):

a.) Religiously-based objections to putting a telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Weirdly, many scientists joined the objections, although there are already several telescopes on Mauna Kea. It looks as if the effort to find truth about the Universe is still trumped by an unwarranted respect for unevidenced religion.  I’m not sure how far we’re supposed to “respect” Hawaiian religious beliefs, but I don’t think it should be to the extent that it puts the island’s major volcano off limits to science. Krauss:

The first inkling of the emerging emphasis of ideology over science in astrobiology came from the support by so many members of that community for the protests against the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. In 2000, the National Academies of Science had identified the project as a top priority for the US astronomy community, and they  recommended that it be built within the decade. Almost immediately, after the dormant volcano Mauna Kea had been selected as the proposed site, local protests began. In spite of the fact that Mauna Kea is the most sacred mountain in Hawaiian religion and culture and was known to Native Hawaiians as the home of Wakea, the sky god, numerous large telescopes had already previously been built on the mountain. Conflict between the priorities of the scientific community and Indigenous religious myths, which had erupted from time to time in the past in Hawaii, escalated after the construction of TMT was set to begin.

While the conflict between science and religious myth is ubiquitous, as witnessed most recently by efforts in New Zealand to teach “Indigenous Knowledge” on the same level as science in high schools, one might have expected the scientific community to support the TMT project more or less unanimously. However, a new generation of young astronomy activists has begun online efforts using the hashtag #ScientistsforMaunaKea, and they consider protecting the sacred nature of the mountain to be more important than the possible scientific benefits of this trailblazing project.

Krauss shows a tweet:

b.) Calls to “decolonize” astrobiology because somehow it’s associated with racism. I can’t quite see the connection, but it’s coming to dominate this field, to the extent that “astrobiology” often seems more about ideology than about science:

 I have written earlier about the emerging effort by young astrobiologists to “decolonize” the search for extraterrestrial life. The once-great science magazine, Scientific American, which has degenerated in recent years as social justice concerns have taken priority over science, published an article entitled “Cultural Bias Distorts the Search for Alien Life” (“‘Decolonizing’ the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) could boost its chances of success, says science historian Rebecca Charbonneau”). Therein she made the argument that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence might be “undermined by biases they only dimly perceive—biases that could, for instance, be related to the misunderstanding and mistreatment of Indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups that occurred during the development of modern astronomy and many other scientific fields.”

Here’s a Q&A from Charbonneau’s piece, so you can see the argument. Countries are building empires on other planets! Ceiling Cat help us if we encounter “aliens”, especially if we can enslave them. (It’s more likely to be the other way around.)

[Magazine] How does this apply to SETI?

[Charbonneau] Oftentimes when we think about colonialism in SETI, we do think of it primarily in metaphors, right? Space being “the final frontier,” first contact with aliens as a stand-in for encounters with Indigenous peoples—that sort of thing. But it actually is much more than a metaphor. Because space exploration is also an extension of our imperial and colonial histories. We know that space infrastructure, including SETI infrastructure, exists in remote locations, with places that often have colonial histories or vulnerable populations, particularly Indigenous peoples. And then space, despite our best efforts, is highly militarized. Nations talk about becoming space superpowers, building new empires and colonizing other planets. So it’s not just a metaphor. It’s actually happening in the world and off the world, and that’s why I think it’s a useful term when we’re talking about SETI. And SETI in particular carries a lot of intellectual, colonial baggage as well, especially in its use of abstract concepts like “civilization” and “intelligence,” concepts that have been used to enact real, physical harm on Earth.

Yes, because “civilization:” and “intelligence” are parts of white supremacy (see below).

c.) Unacceptable and ideological policing of behavior and language. Yes, this takes place in astrobiology, as it does in chemistry, physics, biology, and math. Krauss ends his piece with a new rule for this year’s SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) meetings. (He first notes that last year’s meetings voted to ban the use of the word “intelligence” because it was a “white construct”!)

Not to be outdone by last year’s nonsense, the organizers of this year’s Penn State meeting, which will take place in June, just announced a code of conduct related to unacceptable behavior. The behavior that might lead to exclusion from these conferences now is not confined to mere actions but also to promoting or even citing the work of any scientist the organizing group deems as being unworthy! The code of conduct includes the following explanation:

II. Unacceptable behaviour

[…]Promote the work of those who have violated Professional Codes of Ethics (e.g., the AAS Code of Ethics). Promotion of an author’s work includes any verbal or visual presentation including that person’s name or likeness. In cases where the participant’s work is sufficiently scientifically-independent from that of the person who has violated the professional code, the work may be presented so long as the presenter is not engaging in promotion. Citations are not violations of this policy, though all participants should weigh the necessity of presenting that citation with the harm that it could perpetuate.

That last phrase is particularly telling. In almost all fields of scholarship, not citing the previous work of other authors on which one’s own work is based is referred to as plagiarism. In astrobiology, citing such work can also now be considered harmful.

The notion that citing past scientific results in scientific papers can “perpetuate harm” may not signal the beginning of the end, but it doesn’t bode well for a field that needs to work hard to ensure the highest level of scientific standards if it is to mature as it attempts to address some of the most significant questions we can ask about our place in the universe.

Once you start seeing the word “harm” connected with a science, you better give it close scrutiny, for nearly all the time the word means “offense”, not actual “harm.” And it’s been used in every other science I know of, as well as in medicine, to stymie research. I’m not denying that harm has been caused in the name of science, but nowadays the connection between the two is almost nonexistent.

There’s a lot more in Krauss’s piece, so go read it at the link. I’ll finish by again plugging a paper I’ve written with a colleague arguing that ideology is laying waste to our own field: evolutionary biology. You’ll have to wait until the end of June, though.

Today: First public presentation of photos from the Webb Space telescope

February 7, 2023 • 7:30 am

Reader Sue called my attention to this event, which you can watch free simply by registering (name and email will suffice).  You’ll get a quick email back with the link. Click below to register and see some details:

It’s TODAY at these times:

7-8:30 p.m. Eastern time

6-7:30 p.m. Chicago (Central) time

4-5:30 p.m. Pacific time

And the format:

Professor of astronomy Alex Filippenko explores the first stunning images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Now at its destination one million miles from Earth, the 21-foot-diameter telescope was launched in December 2021.

Alex Filippenko is a Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at UC, Berkeley.

Presented in partnership with Wonderfest: The Bay Area Beacon of Science.

You’ll want to watch it if you’re available!

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 7, 2023 • 8:15 am

Send in your photos! I am sweating blood!

Two batches today: stars ‘n’ squirrels.  First, the three star photos come from Tim Anderson.  Click the photos to enlarge them:

M42, the Orion Nebula:

NGC3372, the Carina Nebula and NGC3532, the Wishing Well Star Cluster

And squirrel photos from Mary Barbara Vance Wilson:

I hit the cute diurnal squirrel trifecta at Collier State Park in Klamath County, Oregon, earlier in September 14.  Golden-mantled Ground Squirrels (Callopermophilus lateralis) are common sights in western parks.  These were busy stashing food for the winter.  They are often confused with chipmunks, which are smaller and have facial stripes.
The Yellow-Pine Chipmunk (Neotamias amoenus), one of the smallest chipmunks, were dashing so fast across the ground, up tree trunks, and over historic logging machinery that getting a photo was difficult.
The Douglas Squirrel  (Tamiasciurus douglasii) is only about as big as the ground squirrels but lacks stripes except for a short bar on the side.  It spends more time in the trees than the other two.

The controversy continues about naming the Webb Space Telescope; the woke won’t give up in the face of the facts

December 20, 2022 • 10:00 am

This article in a recent New York Times tells a sad tale of the vindictiveness of scientific ideologues and their determination to gain control over science by flaunting their own victim status, as well as by blatantly ignoring the truth. It involves the naming of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) over the objections of people who asserted, wrongly, that Webb was a homophobe who fired gay people from NASA and the government (he was administrator of the organization from 1961-1968, and before that the Undersecretary of State from 1949 to 1952).

Click to read the article; if it’s paywalled, judicious inquiry will yield a copy. This is a piece worth reading, and shows that the NYT is not completely woke, for the piece gives an evenhanded story that winds up putting the woke in a pretty bad light.

For a long time, ideologues have criticized the name of the telescope, demanding it be changed (NASA refused to change it). The kvetchers argued that Webb, as both Undersecretary of State and NASA administrator, helped fire gay scientists under orders from people higher in the government. This all stemmed from an executive order issued by President Eisenhower in 1953 barring gay Americans from working for the federal government—an order that wasn’t formally rescinded until Bill Clinton barred job discrimination based on sexual orientation in 1998.

During this period, between 5,000 and 10,000 gay employees were booted out of government jobs. The allegations about Webb arose when NASA decided to name the space telescope after him, claiming that he was complicit in this firing.  But extensive delving into the historical record by several people and agencies shows that these allegations were false. From the NYT (all quotes indented):

Hakeem Oluseyi, who is now the president of the National Society of Black Physicists, was sympathetic to these critics. Then he delved into archives and talked to historians and wrote a carefully sourced essay in Medium in 2021 that laid out his surprising findings.

“I can say conclusively,” Dr. Oluseyi wrote, “that there is zero evidence that Webb is guilty of the allegations against him.”

That, he figured, would be that. He was wrong.

The struggle over the naming of the world’s most powerful space telescope has grown yet more contentious and bitter. In November, NASA sought to douse this fire. Its chief historian, Brian Odom, issued an 89-page report that echoed Dr. Oluseyi’s research and concluded the accusations against Mr. Webb were misplaced.

NASA acknowledged that the federal government at that time “shamefully promoted” discrimination against gay employees. But Mr. Odom concluded: “No available evidence directly links Webb to any actions or follow-up related to the firing of individuals for their sexual orientation.”

. . . As Dr. Oluseyi discovered and NASA’s report confirmed, it was not Mr. Webb but a different State Department official who oversaw the purge and spoke disparagingly of gay Americans.

Indeed, Webb helped to slow down the firing of gay governmental employees:

Secretary of State Dean Acheson denounced the “filthy business” of smearing diplomats. And President Harry Truman, records show, advised Mr. Webb to slow-walk the Republican investigation, while complying with its legal dictates. Mr. Webb did not turn over personnel files to Senate investigators, according to the NASA report.

Webb also has anti-racist bona fides:

Mr. Webb, who died in 1992, cut a complicated figure. He worked with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to integrate NASA, bringing in Black engineers and scientists. In 1964, after George Wallace, the white segregationist governor of Alabama, tried to block such recruitment, Mr. Webb threatened to pull top scientists and executives out of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.

Finally, historians who work on gay history haven’t deemed Webb worthy of indictment:

Historians who specialize in this era in gay history said such expectations ignore the historical context. Mr. Webb did not lead efforts to oust gays; there was not yet a gay rights movement in 1949; and to apply the term homophobe is to use a word out of time and reflects nothing Mr. Webb is known to have written or said.

“The activists who say that James Webb should have stood up and spoken against the purges are anachronistic,” said Dr. Johnson, whose Twitter handle is @gayhistoryprof. “No one in government could stand up at that time and say ‘This is wrong.’ And that includes gay people.”

You’d think that would end the kvetching, right? WRONG!  People who argued that Webb was a homophobe didn’t change their tune in light of the multiple studies showing they were wrong. Instead, led by the notoriously woke physicist and activist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a professor at the University of New Hampshire and an activist who doesn’t miss a chance to parade her intersectional victim status (see below), they simply recalibrated their claims, saying that Webb should have stood up to the government. She and her colleagues had written several pieces objecting to the naming of the JWST on the grounds that Webb was a homophobe.

In a blog written with three fellow scientists, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a cosmologist at the University of New Hampshire with a low six-figure Twitter following, said that it was highly likely that Mr. Webb “knew exactly what was happening with security at his own agency during the height of the Cold War,” adding, “We are deeply concerned by the implication that managers are not responsible for homophobia.”

We’ve met Prescod-Weinstein on this site before—as author of a dreadful article on “white empiricism” that tried to conflate physics with social justice.

And she influenced others. Like all the critics of the JWST, Prescod-Weinstein didn’t do the research that NASA and Hakeem Oluseyi had done; they went after the man and his telescope based on rumors and distortions. Note below that Scientific American, now a woke, inflammatory rag of a magazine, participated in the tarring of Webb (see its two articles “The James Webb Space Telescope needs to be renamed“, of which Prescod-Weinstein was a coauthor, and “New revelations raise pressure on NASA to rename the James Webb Space Telescope“).

. . . . as the telescope neared completion, criticism flared. In 2015, Matthew Francis, a science journalist, wrote an article for Forbes titled “The Problem With Naming Observatories for Bigots.” He wrote that Mr. Webb led the anti-gay purge at the State Department and that he had testified of his contempt for gay people. He credited Dr. Prescod-Weinstein with tipping him off, and she in turn tweeted his article and attacked Mr. Webb as a “homophobe.”

Those claims rested on misidentification and that portion of Mr. Francis’ article has been deleted without notice to the reader. Mr. Francis declined an interview.

Oops!

In October, the Royal Astronomical Society in Britain waded in, declaring that Mr. Webb engaged in “entirely unacceptable” behavior. The society instructed that no astronomer who submits a paper to its journals should type the words “James Webb.” They must use the abbreviation JWST.

The American Astronomical Society demanded in April that NASA issue a formal and public report on its naming decision. And a trio of top scientific publications — Nature, New Scientist and Scientific American — published essays and editorials sharply critical of Mr. Webb with nary a dissenting word. Dr. Oluseyi said Scientific American rejected a letter from him pointing out flawed statements in its essays and rejected his proposal to write about his findings on Mr. Webb.

Scientific American’s editor, Laura Helmuth, declined an interview and wrote in an email that its coverage had been “timely, thorough and fair.”

A petition demanding NASA rename its telescope has garnered more than 1,700 signatures, a majority from faculty and graduate students.

“This is about who we canonize and who are our real saints,” Dr. Prescod-Weinstein said in an interview. “We can’t just exonerate a dead white guy who was in the thick of a repressive government.”

There it is: a dead white guy, as if him being dead, white, and male count towards his perfidy. And even though he didn’t fire anybody, he was—as was every government employee in America—”in the thick of a repressive government.” This is what nasty wokesters say when they can’t pin malfeasance directly on someone. She also said this:

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein wrote that if Mr. Webb had been “a radical freedom fighter,” he would not have served in the Truman administration.

There were NO “radical freedom fighters during the Truman administration”!

Prescod- Weinstein’s rancor was exacerbated by Oluseyi’s report, which alluded to her, though not by name:

When Dr. Oluseyi wrote his essay on James Webb, he took to task journalists and an astrophysicist, whom he did not name, for not rigorously researching the accusations. He said that the scientist, who was cited by name in the Forbes article, had “propagated unsubstantiated false information.”

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein wrote on Twitter that she was this unnamed scientist in Dr. Oluseyi’s article and that he “is writing poorly researched articles that are basically hit pieces on me.”

“The leader of a professional society and a senior scientist,” she wrote, is “going out of his way to justify historic homophobia” and “attack a junior queer Black woman professor.”

Months, later, in August 2021, George Mason University recruited Dr. Oluseyi as a visiting professor, and Peter Plavchan, an astronomy professor, offered a tweet of welcome to the man he played a role in recruiting.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein objected. In a stream of tweets, she said Dr. Oluseyi had championed “a homophobe.”

She wrote that Dr. Plavchan’s welcome was “a reminder that senior men in astronomy can treat junior women” poorly — using an expletive — “and be welcomed by colleagues with open arms.”

Notice the emphasis on her identity, and the victimhood she emphasizes by being attacked by a a “senior” man. When criticized for her inflammatory words, Prescod-Weinsten always brings up the fact that she’s black, gay, a woman, and, sometimes Jewish as well. More from the NYT:

Ms. Prescod-Weinstein, 40, was born in Los Angeles to a family of left-wing activists and is among a handful of Black women to work in theoretical cosmology. Charismatic and outspoken, she describes her writings on race and gender and science as inseparable.

“The civil rights versus gay people schtick is marginalizing and pathetic,” she said. “It’s straight people arguing about the straight canon. As a Black queer Jewish person, I’m not interested.”

Well, Dr. Weinstein, as a white, straight Jewish man (and an old one to boot), I do care: about the truth. Apparently you don’t, and your behavior reeks of self-aggrandizement and sheer nastiness.  Further Prescod-Weinstein also participated in the demonization of Oluseyi by spreading rumors—which again turned out to be false—that he was guilty of transgressions at his former university, Florida Tech.

The attacks against Dr. Oluseyi had shifted, as some accused him of personal misconduct.

Dr. Plavchan said that in July 2021, as word circulated in academia that Dr. Oluseyi might win an appointment at George Mason, he heard from a professor at a different university who claimed that Dr. Oluseyi had mishandled a federal grant and sexually harassed a woman.

Dr. Plavchan said that he reported these accusations to George Mason. Soon Florida Tech officials were combing through records and thousands of emails. They found nothing to substantiate these charges, according to Hamid K. Rassoul, a physics professor at Florida Tech and former dean who took part in the investigation. George Mason went ahead with its appointment in the fall of 2021.

Prescod-Weinstein, who must spend hours a day on Twitter, repeated these false rumors:

On Twitter, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein has pushed some of the same accusations, while not naming Dr. Oluseyi directly. “It continues to be the case that academic institutions play pass the harasser,” she wrote in a veiled reference to Dr. Oluseyi in August 2021. And this past November she questioned on Twitter why journalists have not asked why he left his last job.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein did not reply to three emails asking for more information.

She’s clearly out to get Oluseyi, and since she didn’t get him for homophobia, she’s wants to get him for sexual harassment.

Another person who had no comment was the editor of Scientific American, whom we know well:

Scientific American’s editor, Laura Helmuth, declined an interview and wrote in an email that its coverage had been “timely, thorough and fair.”

Well, read this Sci Am op-ed, by Prescod-Weinstein and two colleagues, and see if it’s thorough and fair. A few quotes:

When he arrived at NASA in 1961, his leadership role meant he was in part responsible for implementing what was by then federal policy: the purging of LGBT individuals from the workforce. When he was at State, this policy was enforced by those who worked under him. As early as 1950, he was aware of this policy, which was a forerunner to the antigay witch hunt known today as the lavender scare. Historian David K. Johnson’s 2004 book on the subject, The Lavender Scare, discusses archival evidence indicating that Webb, along with others in State Department leadership, was involved in Senate discussions that ultimately kicked off a devastating series of federal policies.

. . . This struggle is not limited to science or to the past: Just a few months ago Representative Joaquin Castro of Texas introduced the LOVE Act of 2020, which “requires the State Department to set up an independent commission to review the cases of individuals who were fired since the 1950s as a result of their sexual orientation, receive testimony, and correct employment records.” Passage of the act would not only prompt an apology from Congress for its past complicity in the lavender scare but also provide protections for queer diplomats at home and abroad.

Yet we can honor the incredible heroes who worked tirelessly to liberate others. Before she became a conductor on the Underground Railroad, a disabled and enslaved Harriet Tubman almost certainly used the North Star, just as it is documented that others did, to navigate her way to freedom. Naming the next Hubble the Harriet Tubman Space Telescope (HTST) would ensure that her memory lives always in the heavens that gave her and so many others hope.

Shoot me now! At any rate, Oluseyi (and remember, he’s president of the National Society of Black Physicists) gets the last word:

Dr. Oluseyi is aware of the risk of damage to his reputation. For just a moment, he sounded plaintive.

“Look, I didn’t care about James Webb — he’s not my uncle,” Dr. Oluseyi said. “I had no motivation to exonerate. Once I found the truth, what was I supposed to do?”

The lesson is that being a black, gay, Jewish woman (or a woman editor of Scientific American) doesn’t give you special abilities to discern homophobia if there is no evidence, nor does it make you immune from criticism. If there’s any lesson Prescod-Weinstein should have learned as a member of the scientific community, it’s that the truth is independent of the personal characteristics of the person who finds it.

But then, in another post I wrote about Prescod-Weinstein, I analyzed her Slate piece called “Stop equating ‘science’ with truth.” To her, the truth is simply what is produced by those who have power, a distinctly postmodern position.

The final lesson is this: the woke never apologize (and they double down on their victims who do apologize), and they never admit they were wrong. Wouldn’t it be lovely if Helmuth and Prescod-Weinstein, along with the other critics of James Webb as a homophobe and Oluseyi as a sexual harasser, admitted they were wrong?

Don’t hold your breath.

Readers’ wildlife photos

September 8, 2022 • 8:00 am

We’re getting near the end of photos, and few are coming in. I’m afraid I’ll have to make this feature more sporadic. Today I’m combining photos from three contributors; all their notes and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

The first is Rachel Sperling.

I’m attaching a few photographs I snapped the other week of a female Ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris) and a male Downy woodpecker ( Dryobates pubescens). These were shot in the southern Adirondack Mountains of New York.I’m only a casual birder, but I’ve observed hummingbirds to be very territorial; they’ll expend energy chasing one another away from feeders when there’s plenty of nectar to go around. But this hummingbird didn’t seem at all bothered by the presence of the downy woodpecker. For all I know, that’s common, but I’d never seen it before. I wasn’t able to get a photo of the woodpecker drinking the nectar, but he did appear to be drinking it.

Arthropods from Christopher Moss:

I always called these things tent caterpillars, but now I learn their web tents are seen only in the spring, and in the nodes of large branches and trunks. However, the Fall Webworm (Hyphantria cunea) makes its tents at the end of branches and appears at this time of year. This one caught my eye as it was so big—about four feet long. It’s a good thing for them that my mother, a horticulturalist, is no longer with us. She used to smash the webs up and grind the caterpillars with her bare hands, which made me rather squeamish!

And having these around can hurt your horses.

A black and yellow garden spider (Argiope aurantia), that has made its home on my basil. Apparently venomous and willing to bite if disturbed, with an effect like that of a bumblebee sting on the recipient. I’ll have to leave that pot of basil till last and manage with the others in the meantime!

 

. . . and astronomy photos by Terry Platt.

Here’s a few more images of hydrogen in the Cygnus – Cepheus region of the Milky Way. I hope that they are useful.

Simeis 57 – the ‘Propeller’ nebula is a small component of a much larger area of hydrogen found in North West Cygnus. It is probably about 5,500 light years away.

IC1340 is a very different kind of nebula, in that it is part of a huge expanding cloud of debris from a giant star that became a supernova about 15,000 years ago. Such explosions are the source of the heavy elements that make up most the Earth and the life upon it, so our bodies are composed largely of the debris from similar explosions that occurred billions of years ago.  This nebula is in Eastern Cygnus and is often called the ‘Cirrus’ or ‘Veil’ for obvious reasons. The distance is 2,400 light years.

NGC 7380  – the ‘Wizard’ is one of the few nebulae that seem to fit quite well with an anthropomorphic name. The wizard’s pointy hat is clearly seen near the top, as a dark cone of dust, and his outstretched hands are seen near the centre, full of glow from the magical spell that he is casting. In reality, this is a region of hot hydrogen, which is expanding to the left and sculpting the cooler dust cloud. The Wizard is in Cepheus, a little North of Cygnus, and is about 8,500 light years away.