Total eclipse of the Moon

"This is a very rare event. It only happens every 400 years," said the glossy lady on ITV this morning. "Oh, dear," I said - or maybe something worse. "Text them!" said my wife. But I had to press on with the day so I hope somebody else commented.

Lunar eclipses are visible somewhere on Earth most years. Statistically that means we can see one in Britain on average once every year or two. Sometimes we'll see them in successive years and sometimes we might have to wait two or three years. In 2011 we'll be able to see lunar eclipses on 15 June and 10 December, but then we'll have to wait until 2015.

So, what's this "every 400 years" about? Well, it is apparently more than 400 years since the last time a total eclipse coincided with the winter solstice. This is a coincidence of so little import that nobody has yet bothered to work out when it will happen next but it certainly isn't a recurring event every 400 years. It is equally valid to get excited because a lunar eclipse falls on your birthday, on the birthday of Sun Myung Moon, or on a day when American Werewolf in London is being shown on TCM. But I'm not sure that poor Kate Garraway appreciated any of this and somebody glancing only briefly at that channel - like myself - could easily have come away with the impression that lunar eclipses in general were extremely rare events. I'm really not sure if this was her own impression.

I shouldn't complain; it's great to see a celestial event receiving this much attention. But it's hard not to feel uneasy at some of what gets said on these occasions, and the degree of cosmic ignorance that gets revealed.

Anyway, regardless of which day it falls on, a lunar eclipse is a beautiful and only slightly unusual sight and you won't have to wait 400 years to see the next one.

Why are we still here?

I guess there are several people who'd like answers to that question, each with his or her own view of why we shouldn't still be here. What a lot of fun I could have! But I had something less destructive in mind.

When you think about it, it all seems incredibly old-fashioned: the idea of people sitting in a room listening to another person speak, even with multimedia accompaniment, or talking to one another. What's wrong with them? Don't they have internet in their houses? Surely that's enough, whether they want to know about the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Laplace's Equation, the Killing Times or medieval tapestry. More and more scholarly articles are widely available for those who want to delve deeper. Why come to a class? - you can just teach yourself.

Of course there are a lot of obvious answers. I hope anybody who reads this and is interested will add some of them as comments - just a word or two will be fine, guys! But I'm also wondering, not for the first time, how we can use the new opportunities these media present, what useful revisions of practice they offer us. We need to keep thinking about this because the technologies keep changing.

I was grappling with this topic two or three posts ago and I deferred to Aimee Mann; now I think it's either write a book or tackle it a tiny bit at a time, with no idea of where we'll wind up. And I guess that's what a blog is for. So, first of what may become an extended sequence. Give us your thoughts!

Wondering about wonders of the night sky

I said to my 5 year old son a few clear nights ago, "Get your coat and shoes on and come and see Jupiter through the telescope." This was met with some enthusiasm.

It was a cold, clear night and Jupiter and the Moon were to the south and I set the small scope up on my driveway with my son prancing around me happily. I found the Moon first so I could align the finderscope and then after a little fiddling with screws, I called him to have a look. He continued prancing for another minute or so and then came over.

"Oooh! That's very bright" he said. The moon is very bright through even a small telescope.

Then I swiveled it onto Jupiter. I could see the disk, faint banding and three of the four Galilean moons. I then called my son over again and he looked through the eyepiece.

"But that's rubbish!" he said.

Clearly he expected this

 

but got this

He listened quietly to my attempt at explaining what he was seeing, but seemed unconvinced. I hope my few words lodged somewhere in his mind.

The next night I was doing something similar with a telescope with an evening class at Glasgow University observatory. There was much less prancing around. They were very impressed by the Moon, pleased and interested at Jupiter but disappointed by the smudge that was the Andromeda galaxy. Of course, when you explain that the smudge is a galaxy of several hundred billion stars and that the light they just saw left those stars over 2 million years ago, then that smudge takes on a new significance.

We were also treated to a meteor, a couple of satellites and for a moment we were all perplexed by a strange, flickering orange "star" drifting across the sky to the north. After a bit of theorising, we concluded it was a chinese lantern, which we then confirmed with binoculars and a fleeting glimpse as it zipped across the telescope's field of view.

The night sky is beautiful to the naked eye, but it has an even deeper beauty that can only be appreciated with your mind.

More on Ancient Egypt in Glasgow

Since writing, I've run my hands-on session with my Art students (which went wonderfully well - lots of good photos taken of them looking at objects with such enthusiasm and reverence), and I've run another session where I took my students to the Hunterian Stores - a dark corner of Glasgow on Thurso Street - to look at facsimile paintings of scenes from Theban tombs made by the Rev Colin Campbell, a Glasgow University alumnus, at the turn of the 20th century.

The idea for the Campbell session was to unroll (in the manner of 19th century Egyptologists unwrapping mummies!) the paintings - some of which are over 3m long - and to re-create a tomb space for my students, with all its paintings intact in glorious colour. Of course, we only managed to look at 3 paintings - the time absolutely flew! We got so carried away picking out details and pondering the reasons behind them (e.g. why show a sleepy servant dozing under a tree when everyone around him is busily at work enduring provision for the tomb owner's afterlife?)!

I hope these kinds of sessions will just be the beginning. Sally-Anne Coupar, who curates the Egyptian collection in the Hunterian, has been absolutely wonderful. She firmly believes that the collection should be used to inspire students, which means giving them access rather than having objects hidden away. Another session on the Campbell paintings is planned for the Egyptology Scotland society, who've very generously contributed towards the Campbell paintings conservation fund.

Of course, nothing beats the experience of perusing scenes on tomb walls when you're actually in Egypt in the actual tomb... Although, there's something to be said for being able to get up close and personal with the scenes without feeling that you're slowly melting in the Egyptian dry heat (usually when I'm in the country, it's September, so it's in the mid to high thirties in Luxor...).

These sessions are supposed to inspire my students. They certainly do. Funny thing is - they inspire me too, which is especially important during these turbulent times for teachers.

Aimee Mann

I've been mulling over the implications of the internet for the ownership of knowledge and expertise, and the question of where people like ourselves fit into the big flows of these quantities (can we even speak about them in such terms?) across societal groupings in the light of these new media. Mulling so much I'm not sure what to say that can be spat out in a little blog. Need to mull some more. Or produce a long series of them. Or defer to cleverer people.

So let me just for now share this, possibly surprising news to those who hear the fearsome sounds that sometimes accompany my work in room 406, that this evening I am enjoying very much Aimee Mann's "Bachelor No 2", songs full of darkness, passion and intensity that comes across in the finely and carefully crafted words and the measured arrangements and is only enhanced by the understatement of the singing; strategies for lasting effect. Potent.

Normal service resumed soon.

X-rays

Today is the 115th aniversary of the discovery of X-rays. I've spent a lot of time studying X-rays from cosmic objects (particularly the Sun) so maybe I should have been aware of this particular anniversary; but I wasn't. Google stuck it under my nose, however, in today's eye-catching Google doodle. I'm always interested in bones, graveyards, old keys to crypts best left unvisited, etc. and that's how it caught my eye, but that's not what it announces at all. "X-rays" is a better topic, much more interesting because real.

I'm also thinking, "what a brilliant way to gently push a scientific topic under the noses of millions." What's more, it's generated further coverage and more words on X-rays (doesn't mention, though, that X-rays are one more form of light, not perceived by our eyes but ultimately the same sort of phenomenon as radio, infra-red, visible, ultra-violet...).

I always feel the most valuable things we do, in adult education, involve meeting people who would never have chosen to come anywhere near us. I guess most internet users use Google for something most days. Today when they click on that funny, gothic-looking picture millions of people potentially are being led to think and learn about a physics topic, one they might never have gone near otherwise. Well done, Google!

Life in the Cosmos

Are there living things elsewhere in the universe? Barring the arrival of the flying saucers over the capital cities of the world, we'll have to try to answer this tantalising question using the same tactics employed for any of the big scientific questions, a bit like the assembly of a very large jigsaw puzzle of an unusual character. We have lots of little, detailed pieces for some bits of the picture but there are other, big sections we have few or no pieces for and we're going to have to go out to try to find them. Sometimes we'll come back with a handful of pieces that turn out to be wrong, or to belong in a different jigsaw. We're not really sure of the ultimate size or shape of the picture and there may be entire sections we're not yet aware of, whose existence will only become clear because they're needed to fit into the bits we've completed in detail. At the present time the sizes of the pieces also vary enormously: some parts of the picture are represented in detail by lots of teensy pieces, other bits are like the big, chunky pieces of a toddler's jigsaw, drawing crude, unsubtle shapes in primary colours. We'd love to take the jig saw to those bits and render them more finely, in particular to see if there are big new, unsuspected bits that border them. People will spend their entire scientific careers filling in wee bits of the jigsaw and they may even turn out not to be so important - they were smaller bits, making a smaller part of the picture, than we thought at the time.

There might never come a time when the jigsaw is definitively finished.

Astronomers are working very hard at the extraterrestrial life jigsaw right now, on several different fronts, and there are stories in the media all the time. So in the last couple of days we have learnt that there has been liquid water on Mars in "recent" times; and we've heard that one quarter of observed Sun-like stars harbors a close-in terrestrial-mass planet (these links are to the American journal Science - you can read the abstracts but you'll have to be inside an organisation with a subscription to go further).

The presentation of these stories in the mass media often causes problems, however. "Scientists might possibly have found a new Earthlike planet" is not nearly as attention-grabbing a headline as "At last, an Earthlike planet that could harbour life!" The widely reported discovery of such a planet a couple of weeks ago has turned out to be more tentative than most reports suggested, with an inevitable backlash as foolish as the initial hype. The mystery of the disappearing planet in the Guardian deals really well with this, highlighting the perennial clash between the demands of journalism and the long, painstaking process of completing the jigsaw puzzle.

How can you find out what's behind the headlines? Come to our courses! We'll mention the caveats and uncertainties alongside the exciting results. There's time to ask questions and we're aiming to explore the ideas, not propagandise. My starting point here is Astronomy - and we do have a "Life in the Cosmos" course after Xmas - but these comments apply to any of our science courses, and "explore the ideas", in science or otherwise, is what universities are for.

It's too beautiful a day to sit in the house. But before I stop, here's a very different, I think wonderful sort of science communication: "Dance your PhD 2010".