Up close and personal with Pluto

July 19, 2015 • 12:47 pm

by Grania

Pending a few more black and white images still to be taken, the New Horizons odyssey to Pluto is done. It may still have work to do in the Kuiper Belt, but that has not yet been decided.

They’ve already learned some new things, such as Pluto is geologically active. C.C. Peterson at The Space Writer writes:

In the center left of Pluto’s vast heart-shaped feature – informally named “Tombaugh Regio” – lies a vast, craterless plain that appears to be no more than 100 million years old, and is possibly still being shaped by geologic processes. This frozen region is north of Pluto’s icy mountains and has been informally named Sputnik Planum (Sputnik Plain), after Earth’s first artificial satellite. The surface appears to be divided into irregularly-shaped segments that are ringed by narrow troughs. Features that appear to be groups of mounds and fields of small pits are also visible. The blocky appearance of some features is due to compression of the image.

NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

From NASA’s New Horizons site:

This fascinating icy plains region — resembling frozen mud cracks on Earth — has been informally named “Sputnik Planum” (Sputnik Plain) after the Earth’s first artificial satellite. It has a broken surface of irregularly-shaped segments, roughly 12 miles (20 kilometers) across, bordered by what appear to be shallow troughs. Some of these troughs have darker material within them, while others are traced by clumps of hills that appear to rise above the surrounding terrain. Elsewhere, the surface appears to be etched by fields of small pits that may have formed by a process called sublimation, in which ice turns directly from solid to gas, just as dry ice does on Earth.

Scientists have two working theories as to how these segments were formed. The irregular shapes may be the result of the contraction of surface materials, similar to what happens when mud dries. Alternatively, they may be a product of convection, similar to wax rising in a lava lamp. On Pluto, convection would occur within a surface layer of frozen carbon monoxide, methane and nitrogen, driven by the scant warmth of Pluto’s interior.

You can view a simulation of the flyover here created from the closest-approach images.

There’s also an amazingly detailed picture of the mountains at the equator.

Credits: NASA/JHU APL/SwRI

From the NASA site again:

A new close-up image of an equatorial region near the base of Pluto’s bright heart-shaped feature shows a mountain range with peaks jutting as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface of the icy body.

The mountains on Pluto likely formed no more than 100 million years ago — mere youngsters in a 4.56-billion-year-old solar system. This suggests the close-up region, which covers about one percent of Pluto’s surface, may still be geologically active today.

“This is one of the youngest surfaces we’ve ever seen in the solar system,” said Jeff Moore of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI) at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

There are also new pictures of Charon, Pluto’s moon.

Image Credit: NASA-JHUAPL-SwRI

From NASA’s site again:

A swath of cliffs and troughs stretches about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) from left to right, suggesting widespread fracturing of Charon’s crust, likely a result of internal processes. At upper right, along the moon’s curving edge, is a canyon estimated to be 4 to 6 miles (7 to 9 kilometers) deep.

Mission scientists are surprised by the apparent lack of craters on Charon. South of the moon’s equator, at the bottom of this image, terrain is lit by the slanting rays of the sun, creating shadows that make it easier to distinguish topography. Even here, however, relatively few craters are visible, indicating a relatively young surface that has been reshaped by geologic activity.

In Charon’s north polar region, a dark marking prominent in New Horizons’ approach images is now seen to have a diffuse boundary, suggesting it is a thin deposit of dark material. Underlying it is a distinct, sharply bounded, angular feature; higher resolution images still to come are expected to shed more light on this enigmatic region.

NASA has handled the publicity for this mission really well, there has been a genuine swell in public interest for space exploration. So much so that there is also an earnest campaign underway (apparently supported by a couple of the mission scientists) to reinstate Pluto as a full planet as opposed to a dwarf planet. I’ve kind of got mixed feelings about this myself. It’s wonderful that so many people are prepared to get passionate about space and planets. I’ve been giddy about them myself since I was a small child, so I get it. But this is a perfect way to dig the ground out from under your own feet the next time any scientist wants to point out that science is not decided by popular vote. (Remember when some eejit in Indiana wanted to change the value of pi by legislation?)

This is really endearing.

And so is this.

You can sign the petition here, if you want. I’m still not sure if I am going to, because I don’t think this is the right way to promote science literacy. Perhaps I am wrong, and perhaps I am a cranky curmudgeon. Maybe just getting people to be excited about science is the right way to start. After all, all it took for me as a small child was the shiny photographs in Time Life’s glossy coffee table books on space and the planets, I cared nothing for the scientific method then.

As a last note, don’t miss NASA’s hour long documentary The Year of Pluto.

The art of Kelly Houle: biology, tiny books, and The Origin of Species

July 19, 2015 • 10:45 am

Kelly Houle is the Official Website Artist and Calligrapher™, and we’ve encountered her several times before. She is, for example, engaged in the Illuminated Origin of Species Project, in which she, over at least a decade, will both reproduce Darwin’s Origin in calligraphy and then illuminate it with natural history drawings, just as medieval monks wrote out and illuminated the Bible. (The Origin, of course, is far more worthy of such treatment than fictional books.) You can find more on the Origin project, with the latest updates, on its Facebook page  Kelly also produces miniature books, various drawings of natural history subjects (beetles, birds, and so on), and a whole gamut of work involving watercolors and calligraphy. You can see much of this at her website and Facebook page, and if you like it, you can buy some (it’s remarkably inexpensive for the quality) to support the Origin project. I myself have a bunch of her beetles prints (Darwin, as you remember, was a lover and collector of Coleoptera) and her “I think” phylogeny greeting cards. Finally, Kelly was the illuminator and illustrator of the multiply-autographed edition of WEIT that sold for over $10,300 on eBay, with all proceeds donated to Doctors Without Borders. (Those ingrates never thanked us for the donation!). You can find the artwork to gawk and and to buy at her art-and-book-and-calligraphy webpage. I finally got to meet Kelly last week when she, her husband Ken, Ben Goren, and I journeyed to the home of her parents, Mike and Karen, for a three-day bout of relaxation, local traveling, and noms. Much of this has been documented, and there’s more to come. Before we took off, I visited Kelly at her home in Mesa and was allowed to photograph some of her art and see the way its made. This is Kelly with the two opening pages of the Illuminated Origin: title and frontispiece. These are the final copies (you can see them better here), so you can see how large the entire manuscript will be (each chapter will be separately bound as the book is so large):

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 The circular tree of life combined with a drawing of the Beagle, all on a deep blue background with a gold-leaf phylogeny, is one of my favorite of her works (see a better reproduction here): Origin covers 2 The manuscript will be lettered and illuminated on fancy, thick Italian paper. Here’s one of the earliest pages of the manuscript. It takes several hours to letter each page (all of it laid out in advance), and there is no room for error: if she makes a mistake, she has to do the entire page over.

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Here is the introduction title page, still in progress. As Kelly reports:

The introduction title page features a life-size Toxodon platensis skull as analyzed by Richard Owen. There are links with info and the source image, a drawing by George Scharf, from Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, here, here, and here.

 From the above AMNH page:
“This particular animal belongs to a group without modern descendants, but many of Darwin’s fossils seemed to be huge variants of the same general kind of animal he had seen roaming the landscape during his explorations. This led him to wonder if the fossils might be evidence of ancestral forms. In later years Darwin would write that the South American fossils were essential to the “origin of all my views.”

Introduction One thing that struck me about her work is the immense amount of preparation that takes place before anything is done on the final Origin, her books, and her paintings. Calligraphy is practiced, paint samples are made and worked out in detail, and each step of a beetle drawing, for instance, is done in a notebook, with all details recorded so that it can be reproduced in the final version. She has three workstations; this is the one for preparing The Origin: Darwin table Practice samples of calligraphy adorn the walls: Darwin preparation Color swatches are consulted (and palettes made) so that colors can be exactly reproduced after she makes samples. Here are swatches from the manufacturer: Paint samples Only a small part of her equipment. Below are plastic palettes with premixed, dried watercolors so that a particular color can be used several times: Darwin equipment This is the work station for natural-history watercolors, currently occupied by Kelly’s beetle paintings. Beetle table This is how individual beetle paintings are planned. Each step of the final image is documented and described so that it can be reproduced precisely. I was pretty damn impressed by this degree of care: Beetle notebook Kelly also makes miniature books (I believed they’re strictly defined as books no larger than three inches on a side). They are avidly collected by miniature-book mavens; I had no idea that this area even existed. This is the station where she assembles the books. Book table I’ll let Kelly describe her latest project, an amazing tiny book encased in a handmade box and with a morpho butterfly that appears when you open the box. It’s all in service of the story told in the book:

The Artist of the Beautiful by Nathaniel Hawthorne can be read as an allegory of the conflict between the pursuit of artistic beauty and utilitarianism. Owen Warland, a clockmaker’s apprentice, neglects his duties in his retired master’s clock shop to pursue his dream of creating a lifelike, mechanical butterfly. Inspired by nature and his love for Annie, the shop owner’s daughter, Owen vows to put “the very spirit of beauty into form and give it motion.” When he experiences setbacks and failures, he regains his focus and resilience by turning to nature and his boyhood pastime of studying the intricate forms of birds and insects. Owen submits to his pursuit of beauty so completely that he loses all track of time and his work in the clock shop suffers. By the time he finally reaches his goal and presents his marvelous creation to Annie, she is married to a blacksmith, and they have a child. Owen hands Annie a box. When she opens it, a delicate butterfly emerges, steps onto on her finger, and proceeds to fly around the room. Annie and her husband are amazed, but when their child attempts to capture the butterfly, it is destroyed in an instant. Surprisingly, Owen remains calm and content, having experienced the numinous through the creative process.
The box for this miniature book edition of Hawthorne’s classic was inspired by his description of the box in which Owen presents the butterfly to Annie:
“He produced, as he spoke, what seemed a jewel box. It was carved richly out of ebony by his own hand, and inlaid with a fanciful tracery of pearl, representing a boy in pursuit of a butterfly, which, elsewhere, had become a winged spirit, and was flying heavenward; while the boy, or youth, had found such efficacy in his strong desire that he ascended from earth to cloud, and from cloud to celestial atmosphere, to win the beautiful.”

Morpho book box

The box was handmade by Mike Houle, and the book was designed and digitally typeset by Ken Howard. I designed the pearl inlay, sewed the books by hand, and bound them in cloth with hand-marbled endpapers by Ann Muir. I also painted the pop-up butterfly on both sides with iridescent watercolors. The book was made in an edition of 8. There are 6 copies remaining, one of which is listed on the Books of Kell’s Press Ebay auction site booksilluminated
A percentage of the sales from this book is being donated to DebRa of America, an organization that funds medical research and helps children with and their families cope with Epidermolysis Bullosa, also known as “The Worst Disease You’ve Never Heard Of.™”
This lifelike morpho butterfly, painted on both sides, pops up when you open the box:

P1080618 The marbled endpapers: Morpho book end papers The calligraphy of the book’s text: Morpho book type One of Kelly’s miniature beetle books: Beetle book Finally, Kelly gave me this lovely watercolor of Darwin’s orchid, Angraecum sesquipedale, a Madagascar orchid with an enormous nectar spur (27–43 cm, or 10.6–16.9 in). As Wikipedia notes:

[The orchid] is noteworthy for its long spur and its association with the naturalist Charles Darwin, who surmised that the flower was pollinated by a then undiscovered moth with a proboscis whose length was unprecedented at the time. His prediction had gone unverified until 21 years after his death, when the moth was discovered and his conjecture vindicated. The story of its postulated pollinator has come to be seen as one of the celebrated predictions of the theory of evolution.

My gift My friend Phil deVries recently captured the first video of the moth actually pollinating the orchid. You can see the video, and my post about it, here.  The picture above was one of the illustrations that Kelly added to our auctioned-off copy of WEIT.  This copy, however, will grace my wall. I ‘ll post more on our adventures in Arizona when time permits.

Readers’ Wildlife: The Birds & The Bees. Also, Stars.

July 19, 2015 • 9:30 am

by Grania

Regular Stephen Barnard sent us these gorgeous photos from his piece of paradise in Idaho.

As always, click through twice on a picture to see it in its original size.

Common Nighthawk (Chordeiles minor).

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Wilson’s Snipe (Gallinago delicata), trying to hide.

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Rufous Hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus), busy bullying the Black-chinned.

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Landscape looking North from Silver Creek toward the Big Wood Valley
and the Pioneer Mountains.

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Just-as-regular Ben Goren sent some beautiful finches and a bee. He writes:

For the photo geeks: everything was taken with a Canon 5Ds and either Canon’s EF 180mm f/3.5 L Macro or their TS-E 24mm f/3.5 L II. Processing is minimal, limited to exposure, white balance, cropping, sharpening, and noise reduction. Color profiling is done with my new spectroscopic workflow…which has most, but not all, of the kinks worked out. That is to say, the color _should_ be very accurate, but I also know it’s not perfect.

This is a typical early morning scene at the main feeder in the Houle’s back yard: a constant flurry of several birds of various species. At times, quail will gather below to eat what falls to the ground. There’s another feeder to the right that Mike puts peanuts in for the jays. I’ve no clue of species, but I know there’re readers (including Mike, if he sees them) who can identify them.

[ Color corrected by ArgyllCMS ]
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The finches get their breakfast by the driveway.

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Around on the north side of the home is a bush positively exploding with honeybees. This is a 1:1 macro picture; if you make a 24mm x 36mm print of the entire frame, the bee will be actual size.

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And finally, reader Tim Anderson sent this stunning shot of the South Celestial Pole – you have to click through on it to view in its enlarged glory). He writes:

This is a long-exposure photograph (15 minutes) of the sky directly south from Tumut, Australia. It shows the South Celestial Pole – the imaginary point around which the stars appear to rotate. It is, in fact, the point that is exactly parallel to the Earth’s axis of rotation, and its elevation above the horizon is therefore exactly equal to the observer’s latitude.

One of the more arcane skills required for astrophotography is being able to locate the SCP and align your telescope’s right-ascension axis to it (told you it is arcane). In the northern hemisphere, you simply point the telescope at Polaris, which is close enough to the NCP for practical purposes.

In the southern hemisphere, there is no bright star close to the pole, and you have to dance a complicated mathematical jig with a compass, magnetic declination and whatnot, or else embark upon the fearsome procedure known as “drift alignment”. In winter, this requires thermal underwear and a balaclava.

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Thanks guys, those are incredible!

Not photoshopped: Gull on Eagle on Gull & Horse on Horse

July 19, 2015 • 8:15 am

by Grania

We’ve all seen the photo of the shark jumping at the helicopter, which is as fake as a fish on a bicycle; but here are two fascinating pictures that are completely real.

From the Puffle Ho, David Canales snapped this amazing shot while kyaking in Prince William Sound, Alaska.

The sad, but inevitable news: the eagle won.

And from the Daily Mewl, a foal in North Yorkshire has been born with a marking that looks like a horse. There are more photos at the link. His owners have called him Da Vinci, or Vinnie for short.

 

Thanks and a Hat-tip: John Williamson

Sunday: Hili Dialogue

July 19, 2015 • 7:23 am

Good morning!

Hope the weekend has been good so far and you plan on doing serious relaxing today.

Toady in 1799 the Rosetta Stone was found, a tablet that was inscribed in Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Egyptian demotic and allowed for a breakthrough in deciphering hieroglyphics and therefore understanding Egyptian ancient history and culture. In 1879 Doc Holliday killed for the first time before abandoning his saloon business and joining his friend Wyatt Earp at Tombstone the following year, and in 1943 the USA bombed Rome as an “incentive” to lose confidence in Mussolini.

On to more civilized things.

In Poland, Madam Hili is making her presence felt, so to speak.

Hili: Don’t you think she is taking up this whole desk chair?
A: The evidence shows something quite different.
Hili: But just look how cramped I am!

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In Polish:

Hili: Czy nie masz wrażenia, że ona zajmuje cały fotel?
Ja: Dowody wskazują na coś zupełnie innego.
Hili: To popatrz jak mi tu ciasno.

Michael Shermer’s “review” of Faith versus Fact

July 18, 2015 • 10:45 am

I put “review” in quotes above, because Michael Shermer’s precis of Faith versus Fact in the latest Scientific American isn’t really a review at all, but a further plumping for his claim that—as Sam Harris also espouses—science can hand us objective moral truths. (See Shermer’s new book, The Moral Arc, for a fuller exposition.) The full Sci Am piece is behind a paywall, but here’s what Michael says about FvF.

He’s talking here about Steve Gould’s NOMA hypothesis: that science and religion comprise “nonoverlapping magisteria” because science’s duty is to tell us about the natural world, while the bailiwick of religion is that of meaning, morals, and values. Gould saw this as a way to reconcile the two areas, with each occupying an “equally important” area.  I take Gould’s thesis apart of FvF, but you can read my book if you want to see those criticisms. Here’s what Shermer says:

Initially I embraced NOMA because a peaceful concordat is usually more desirable than a bitter conflict (plus, Gould was a friend), but as I engaged in debates with theists over the years, I saw that they were continually trespassing onto our turf with truth claims on everything from the ages of rocks and miraculous healings to the reality of the afterlife and the revivification of a certain Jewish carpenter. Most believers hold the tenets of their religion to be literally (not metaphorically) true, and they reject NOMA in practice if not in theory—for the same reason many scientists do. In his 2015 penetrating analysis of Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne eviscerates NOMA as “simply an unsatisfying quarrel about labels that, unless you profess a watery deism, cannot reconcile science and religion.”

Curiously, however, Coyne then argues that NOMA holds for scientists when it comes to meaning and morals and that “by and large, scientists now avoid the ‘naturalistic fallacy’—the error of drawing moral lessons from observations of nature.” But if we are not going to use science to determine meaning and morals, then what should we use? If NOMA fails, then it must fail in both directions, thereby opening the door for us to experiment in finding scientific solutions for both morals and meaning.

Well, how about using reason and philosophy, as well as innate preferences, to determine meaning and morals? I won’t go into my objections to the science-can-tell-us-moral-truths fallacy (yes, it’s a fallacy), as I’ve laid them out before. Suffice it to say that at the bottom of all “scientific” schemes of determining morality are preferences that lie outside science’s ambit. Certainly science can help us determine the best ways to realize our preferences, but can Shermer tell us, for instance, whether it’s immoral to shoot coyotes that are suspected of eating livestock? How do you weigh the different varieties of well being (if that’s your currency for morality), and balance them against each other? How can that ever be more than a judgment call?

Well, I’ll let the readers argue this one out. At least Shermer called my book a “penetrating analysis” in the middle of an extended advertisement for his own book. Reader John O’Neall informs me that both Shermer’s and my own book are on the Edge summer reading list (no surprise given that John Brockman, who runs Edge, is our agent), but there are several other intriguing books on the list, including the second volume of Richard Dawkins’s autobiography and Yuval Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which has gotten good reviews.

Readers’ wildlife photos: sparrows & a Cedar Waxwing

July 18, 2015 • 8:30 am

WEIT regular Diana MacPherson has sent us these beautiful photographs of sparrows. She writes:

Young Sparrow (Passer domesticus) On Weigela Branch Watch for Food Opportunities.
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Young Sparrows (Passer domesiticus) On Weigela Branch Watch for Food Opportunities
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Young Sparrows (Passer domesiticus) On Weigela Branch – What squabbling. Birds are so expressive!
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Don’t Look Now, But a Bird Is Watching You (Young Sparrows (Passer domesticus))
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Young Sparrows (Passer domesticus) In the Sun
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And finally, Stephen Barnard sent in an amazing photograph of a Cedar Waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum) catching mayflies.
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Caturday, now with added twinkle

July 18, 2015 • 7:29 am

by Grania

From The Dodo, we have an item of clothing that no self-respecting cat-server will do without: the Mewgaroo hoodie for toting around your favorite felid.

You know you want one. No. You need one. Two, in fact for when one is in the wash.

Terry Pratchett once wrote:

“In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.”

Neither have the Japanese apparently, as Cat stationmaster Tama mourned in Japan, elevated as goddess. Jerry mentioned Tama before when she was still alive. Yahoo news reports:

The cat had climbed the corporate ladder from stationmaster to “ultra-stationmaster” and vice president of the company before receiving the additional title Sunday of “honorable eternal stationmaster.”

If you feel you’re not getting enough cats in your day, there is a 24 hour a day channel where you can watch endless cat videos now and forever, behold Cats 24/7

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And what Caturday would be complete without a Public Service Announcement.

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Consider yourself warned. You’re welcome.

Onto the educational part of this post. Bored Panda informs us that Cats in kimonos are a thing now. Of course they are.

On a more artistic note, Bored Panda also tells of a Serbian painter Endre Penovac who specialises in watercolor and ink cats. They are rather beautiful. Click through on the link to see more in his gallery.

Onto more prosaic things. Tastefully Offensive feature a video by San Diego-based animator Kelsey Goldych called Trash Cat.  Be sure to watch the little bit after the credits.

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Click through to watch

Fighting a noble social justice war, photographer David Williams has a project called Men and Cats. OneMorePost notes:

He started in 2009 simply to go against the norm of the ‘crazy cat lady’ impression…. [and] had hoped to show the joy too be found in having a cat as a friend and pet regardless of the gender.

Well, duh. Click through here to see more.

The PuffleHo reports on a cat that is running for president. As a Demo-cat.

Oh well, Limberbutt McCubbins’ policies are at least as good as all the other candidates, and he’s indubitably more articulate than at least one that I can think of. Also, best poster ever.

So where is the twinkle in all this. The title promised twinkle after all.

It’s butt bling for cats. Really. There’s a whole website devoted to it. And a video.

I never want to spend this much time staring at a cat’s butt again.

 

 

 

Hat-tip to Taskin, Lesley, Chris, Steve, Su, Mark, Aaron, Ginger, T Fife.