Spaceship on the Mountain

A lenticular cloud over the San Francisco Peaks on 24 December.  We were on our way back to Flagstaff after visiting the Grand Canyon.

Results of Plutocracy

Messenger Photo of Mercury

As reported in Sky & Tel, Messenger made a flyby of Mercury on Monday.  Here’s an amazing photo from 27,000 km out.  (The flyby got to within 200 km.)

Images from My Microscope

A slide show from my microscope:

Tree Pollen Images

Below are images of one variety of tree pollen, taken from my finger after running it along the hood of my car.  I stained the sample with gentian violet.  This type (there are several others in the sample) consists of a central lobe with two half-spheres attached—rather like Princess Leia’s hairdo.  I took the images by aiming by hand a Canon PowerShot SD630 into one of the eyepieces of my microscope.

Here’s a “lower"-magnification overview (890x on a 96 dpi monitor):

Here the central lobe of a different spore is in focus under high mag (2200x @96 dpi):

Here’s a close-up of the lower-right Leia hair bun (off-screen in the previous image) from the same spore (2200x @96 dpi):

Drug Warriors Push Eye-Eating Fungus

from In These Times:

By Jeremy Bigwood

On April 16, the New York Times ran a full-page ad from contact lens producer Bausch and Lomb, announcing the recall of its “ReNu with MoistureLoc” rewetting solution, and warning the 30 million American wearers of soft contact lenses about Fusarium keratitis. This infection, first detected in Asia, has rapidly spread across the United States. It is caused by a mold-like fungus that can penetrate the cornea of soft contact lens wearers, causing redness and pain that can lead to blindness—requiring a corneal replacement.

That same week, the House of Representatives passed a provision to a bill requiring that the very same fungus be sprayed in “a major drug-producing country,” such as Colombia. The bill’s sponsor was Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) and its most vocal supporter was his colleague Dan Burton (R-Ind.), who has been promoting the fungus for almost a decade as key to winning the drug war.

The Colombian government has come out against it. And those entities of the U.S. government that have studied the use of Fusarium for more than 30 years don’t recommend it either: The Office of National Drug Control Policy, also known as the Drug Czar’s office, CIA, DEA, the State Department and the USDA have all concluded that the fungus is unsafe for humans and the environment.

“Fusarium species are capable of evolving rapidly. … Mutagenicity is by far the most disturbing factor in attempting to use a Fusarium species as a bioherbicide,” wrote David Struhs, then secretary of Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection, in a 1999 letter rejecting the use of the fungus against Florida’s outdoor marijuana crop. “It is difficult, if not impossible, to control the spread of Fusarium species.”

Mutation of the fungus allows it to attack other “hosts.” The eye-eating Fusarium seems to be a result of such a mutation. After all, the soft-contact lenses that it grows behind are a recent development—having only been commercially available since 1971.

The DEA stopped funding Fusarium research in the United States during the early ’90s after it learned that Fusarium infections can be deadly in “immunocompromised” people—not only AIDS patients and those with other illnesses, but also those who are severely malnourished. The University of the Andes in Bogot� has recently reported that 12 percent of Colombian children suffer from chronic malnutrition. Spraying this fungus on a vulnerable population could be perceived as using a biological weapon.

The CIA has been against the use of Fusarium to kill drug crops since at least 2000. At that time, one official told the Times, “I don’t support using a product on a bunch of Colombian peasants that you wouldn’t use against a bunch of rednecks growing marijuana in Kentucky.”

A top scientist from the USDA, which has studied the fungus the longest, said that his agency “cannot support” its use. And the State Department, whose Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement carries out drug crop eradication all over the world, does not support it, either.

In 2000, when Congress first passed “Plan Colombia,” the Colombian aid package that ordered the use of the fungus in Colombia, President Clinton waived the part of the bill that dealt with the fungus because he thought its use would be perceived as biological warfare. At the same time, the Andean Community of Nations, an organization comprising Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela, banned it within their territories.

So, who does support the spraying of the eye-eating fungus over other countries? Only a few adamant drug war jihadists in the House, led by Burton, who are frustrated by the lack of progress in the drug war.

The fungus provision has already passed the House, but the Senate version of the bill contains no similar language. Responsibility for a final decision rests on the conference committee where the House and Senate bills will be reconciled—scheduled to happen before this summer.

3C 75 in Abell 400: Gravitationally Bound Black Holes

From the Chandra X-Ray Observatory:
This composite X-ray (blue)/radio (pink) image of the galaxy cluster Abell 400 shows radio jets immersed in a vast cloud of multimillion degree X-ray emitting gas that pervades the cluster. The jets emanate from the vicinity of two supermassive black holes (bright spots in the image). These black holes are in the dumbbell galaxy NGC 1128, which has produced the giant radio source, 3C 75.

Mars by Google

Here is an image of a portion of Mars that Andrei Munteanu (a student at Harvard) stitched together from Google Mars maps.  Click on the image below for an 800×600 (260 kB) version.  For a full-size image (1600×1200, ~760 kB), click here.

A magnetic torsional wave near the Galactic Centre traced by a ‘double helix’ nebula

from a paper in Nature:

Mark Morris, Keven Uchida and Tuan Do

Abstract

The magnetic field in the central few hundred parsecs of the Milky Way has a dipolar geometry and is substantially stronger than elsewhere in the Galaxy, with estimates ranging up to a milligauss. Characterization of the magnetic field at the Galactic Centre is important because it can affect the orbits of molecular clouds by exerting a drag on them, inhibit star formation, and could guide a wind of hot gas or cosmic rays away from the central region. Here we report observations of an infrared nebula having the morphology of an intertwined double helix about 100 parsecs from the Galaxy’s dynamical centre, with its axis oriented perpendicular to the Galactic plane. The observed segment is about 25 parsecs in length, and contains about 1.25 full turns of each of the two continuous, helically wound strands. We interpret this feature as a torsional Alfvén wave propagating vertically away from the Galactic disk, driven by rotation of the magnetized circumnuclear gas disk. The direct connection between the circumnuclear disk and the double helix is ambiguous, but the images show a possible meandering channel that warrants further investigation.

NGC 3242: The Ghost of Jupiter

from APotD and the University of Washington we have this HST image of the planetary nebula NGC 3242 (noise removed by Neat Image in Photoshop).

Two Moons Passing in the Night

from JPL:

Taking advantage of extra solar energy collected during the day, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit settled in for an evening of stargazing, photographing the two moons of Mars as they crossed the night sky. “It is incredibly cool to be running an observatory on another planet,” said planetary scientist Jim Bell of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., lead scientist for the panoramic cameras on Spirit and Opportunity. In this animation, both martian moons, Deimos on the left and Phobos on the right, travel across the night sky in front of the constellation Sagittarius. Part of Sagittarius resembles an upside-down teapot. Phobos is the brighter object on the right; Deimos is on the left.

Spirit acquired these enhanced-brightness images with the panoramic camera on the night of sol 585 (Aug. 26, 2005). Scientists will use images of the two moons to better map their orbital positions, learn more about their composition, and monitor the presence of nighttime clouds or haze. Spirit took the six images that make up this animation using the camera’s broadband filter, which was designed specifically for acquiring images under low-light conditions.

Coronal Loops at the Solar Limb

This is a TRACE image of coronal loops over the eastern limb of the Sun, taken on November 6, 1999, at 02:30 UT, in the light of 171Å x-rays. The plasma here is roughly 1 million degrees K. Click on the image for a larger version (768×768, 107kB). I've removed the serious jpeg image compression artifacts from the original.

Tethys, Rings, and Shadows

Courtesy today’s APotD we have this stunner (somewhat improved via Photoshop and NeatImage):


Click on the image for a larger version (1019×879, 74k).

A Stellar Microjet in the Rosette Nebula

Jin Zeng Li and Travis Rector have discovered a disk + jet structure emanating from an otherwise ordinary F star in the Rosette Nebula.  See their article in the Astrophysical Journal.  Meaburn et al. have recently confirmed that this is indeed a stellar microjet.  The text below is the abstract of their paper.  Click on the image for a high-resolution version (1490×1196, 174k).  I have cleaned up their image (taken with the Kitt Peak National Observatory 0.9 m telescope) by removing noise, removing pixellation, and slightly stretching the histogram.

We report on the discovery of an optical jet with a striking morphology in the Rosette Nebula. It could be the most extreme case known of an accretion disk and jet system directly exposed to strong ionization fields that impose strong effects on disk evolution. Unlike typical optical flows, this jet system is found to have a high excitation nature mainly due to disruptive interaction with the violent environment. As a result, the extension of the highly collimated jet and possible former episodes of the degenerated counterjet all show bow-shocked structures. Our results provide implications on how incipience of massive stars in giant molecular clouds prevents further generations of low-mass star formation, and possibly also how isolated substellar/planetary-mass objects in regions of massive star formation are formed.

Rings and a Moon

Click for a larger (and better) view.