Bad Astronomy. Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing 'Hoax'

They put them up, and within days (or more likely hours) received so many angry e-mails from people protesting the horoscopes that the decision was hastily made to take those pages down. I have no doubt that there was some disconnect between the business end of the site and the content folks (I can imagine the business people figuring astrology has something to do with stars, and that’s space-related, right?), but in the end the correct thing was done, and hopefully a lesson was learned. I wish the same could be said about newspapers.

On second thought, maybe I was wrong a moment ago: putting horoscopes in newspapers is not the most appalling aspect here. I think the most disturbing part is the pervasiveness of astrology. It’s a numbers game; as long as enough people are fooled, it can be self-sustaining. Stories are told, critical thinking goes out the window, and more people believe. Where does it stop? People laughed when former U.S. president Ronald Reagan’s wife Nancy relied on an astrologer to make appointments for meetings when the signs were auspicious, but this is no laughing matter. He was the president of the United States, and his wife was relying on an astrologer! That’s just about the scariest thing I can think of. I would hope someone wielding that much power would have just a wee bit more rational thinking ability.

Incidentally, the horoscope cast for me on the web did have more to say, and it sums up this chapter better than anything I could possibly write:

Though you may be as intelligent as anyone, you do not really have a rational, logical approach toward life, and trying to reach you through logical arguments is often futile. Your feelings, intuition, and heart, not your head, lead you, which may infuriate or bewilder your more rational friends. You certainly recognize that there is much more to life than can be explained intellectually and categorized into neat little boxes, and you have an open, receptive attitude toward such areas as psychic phenomena, telepathy, parapsychology, etc.

After reading this chapter, wouldn’t you say that sounds just like me?

Part V Beam Me Up

We’ve traveled a long way in this book, from rooms in which we live to the ends of the universe and finally back again, to plunge into the cobwebbed depths of the human mind. Where, of course, there is still more bad astronomy. Don’t think that the next chapters are in this last section because the topics didn’t fit anywhere else in the book! Oh no, these chapters are special, so special that I decided that they didn’t belong earlier in the book. (That, and they didn’t really fit in with anything either.)

In this final section we’ll see the best and the worst of ourselves as reflected in our works. We’ll start with the Hubble Space Telescope, certainly the most abused $6 billion observatory ever built. There are so many misconceptions about Hubble that a whole book could be written about them. I hope you’ll settle for just a single chapter.

Hubble may have cost a lot, but you don’t need the gross national product of a country to buy the stars. Some companies will sell stars to you for a substantially reduced, though not inconsiderable price. But this depends on what you mean by “sell.” It’s not really stars these companies sell so much as a bill of goods. They promise the sky, but all they deliver is a piece of paper of dubious astronomical value. And there are darker implications of this transaction, too.

Our final exploration of bad astronomy takes us back to the silver screen. Epic myths may be Hollywood’s biggest staple, but Tinseltown’s grasp of science has never been the best. The box office may be the biggest purveyor of bad astronomy that exists. Spaceships don’t roar through the skies, asteroids aren’t that big of a danger, and aliens aren’t likely to take a pit stop at Earth long enough to eat us. At least I hope they don’t.

Of course, if they do, my job gets a lot easier. Bad astronomy would be the least of our worries.

22. Hubble Trouble: Hubble Space Telescope Misconceptions

In 1946 astronomer Lyman Spitzer had a fairly silly idea: take a big telescope and put it in space. Looking back on his idea more than half a century later, it doesn’t seem so crazy. After all, various nations have spent billions of dollars on telescopes in space, so someone must be taking the idea seriously. But in 1946 World War II was barely a year in the history books and the first launch of a satellite into orbit was still more than 10 years away.

Spitzer was a visionary. He knew that a telescope in space would have huge advantages over one on the ground, even before the first suborbital rocket flight gave others the idea that it was even possible. Sitting at the bottom of our soupy atmosphere yields a host of troubles for ground-based telescopes. The atmosphere is murky, dimming faint objects. It’s turbulent, shaking the images of stars and galaxies until they all look like one blurry disk. Perhaps worst of all, our air is greedy and devours certain types of light. Some ultraviolet light from celestial objects can penetrate our atmosphere (the ultraviolet from the Sun is what gives us tans, or worse), but most of it gets absorbed on the way in. The same goes for infrared light, gamma rays, and x-rays. Superman may have x-ray vision, but even he couldn’t see a bursting neutron star emit x-rays unless he flew up beyond the atmosphere, where there is no air to stop those energetic little photons.

I doubt Spitzer was thinking of Superman when he first proposed a space telescope, but the idea’s the same. If you can loft a telescope up, up, and away, out of the atmosphere, all those atmospheric problems disappear. The ultraviolet and other flavors of light that cannot penetrate our atmosphere are easily seen when you’re above it. If the air is below instead of above you it won’t make stars twinkle, and the faint objects will appear brighter without the air glowing all around them, too.

Spitzer’s vision became reality many times over. Dozens of telescopes have been launched into the Earth’s orbit and beyond, but by far the most famous is the Hubble Space Telescope (colloquially called HST or just Hubble by astronomers). At an estimated total cost of $6 billion, Hubble has made headlines over and over again. Its images have made millions gasp in awe, and the astronomers who use HST have learned more from it than perhaps any other telescope in history, except, just maybe, Galileo’s.

If you ask a random person in the street to name a telescope, Hubble is almost certainly the only one he or she will know. However, sometimes the price of fame is misconception in the public eye. Ask anything more specific, and that person will probably falter. Not many people know how big it is, where it is in space, or even why it’s in orbit. Some think it’s the biggest telescope in the world (or, more technically, above the world), some think it actually travels to the objects it observes, and others think it is hiding secrets from the public.

At this point in the book you’ve figured out on your own that none of these statements is true. Let’s see why.

It’s Done with Mirrors

Even the most basic aspects of the Hubble telescope are misunderstood. For example, CNN’s web site, when describing one particular Hubble observation, had a headline that read, “Stars Burst into Life before Hubble’s Lens.” Actually, Hubble doesn’t have a lens. Like most big telescopes, Hubble has a mirror that gathers and focuses light. No less a luminary than Isaac Newton first figured out that a mirror can be used instead of a lens, and the most basic design for a mirrored telescope is still called a Newtonian. Four hundred years later, it still causes confusion.