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

long list of supposed NASA shenanigans, most of which involve space aliens. It would be fair to call Hoagland a kook. He leads the cause for the alien nature of the Face on Mars as well as a host of other fringe claims. On his web site (http://www.enterprisemission.com) he has an article about the Moon and Hubble with the headline: “NASA Caught in Yet Another Lie.”

Hoagland quotes a Hubble astronomer and expert on Hubble imaging. As Hoagland relays on his web page, a UFO researcher asked the astronomer the following question: “Has Hubble taken any photos of the moon?” He responded: “No, the moon is too bright (even the dark side) to observe with HST.”

I know this astronomer and called him about this. I swear I could hear his embarrassed smile on the phone. He apologized and said that the quote was sadly accurate, and he could kick himself for making the mistake. He simply wasn’t thinking clearly and said the wrong thing. Unfortunately, with the web cranks can use his misstatement for their own ends. Hoagland claims that this is part of the NASA/alien cover-up of bases on the Moon. His headline about “NASA lies” is a bit disingenuous. A lie implies intent to deceive, while in reality an honest error was made. Also, the astronomer is not a NASA employee. Accuracy is perhaps not Hoagland’s forte.

Hoagland’s thrust is that this is just another NASA lie to cover up the fact that Hubble can indeed observe the Moon. According to his twisted logic, NASA spent years saying the Moon was off limits to Hubble to keep astronomers from finding the aliens. If that’s true, why did NASA allow the team of astronomers to observe the Moon at all? In a rather typical example of conspiracy-theory logic, Hoagland ignores obvious facts that go against his conclusions.

It would be silly of NASA to maintain a conspiracy by claiming that the Moon is too bright to observe when, in fact, it was public record from the start that it routinely observes the much brighter Earth. Hoagland assumes, from one astronomer’s single misstatement, that everyone in the astronomical community is part of a massive conspiracy and would blindly stick to an argument that is clearly contradictory to facts. Having worked with some of the astronomers and engineers who designed and use Hubble, I can assure you that these hardworking, intelligent, and clever people have no interest in covering anything up.

It gets even better. Not only was NASA not covering anything up, it actually initiated a fairly large amount of hoopla over the Hubble Moon images. Like most cranks, Hoagland is capable of weaving entire empires from fantasy, and would rather accuse people of lying than actually try to think logically for a moment.

In the end, the cranks and conspiracy theorists will believe whatever tale they tell themselves, as they always do and always will.

Paved with Good Intentions

I’ll leave Hubble with one more story.

Probably my favorite media misadventure with Hubble involves that bastion of near-reality, the Weekly World News. Everyone knows their articles are jokes… or do they? It sells pretty well in grocery stores, and I always wonder how many people take it seriously.

Headlines often scream, “Angels are Real — and Visiting Your Bathroom!” or “Boy Born Half-Bat Terrorizes Neighborhood!” On July 19, 1994, the News had a story headlined “First Photos from Hell!” with the subtitle, “Listening device picks up screams coming from Black Hole!” (They use a lot of exclamation points.) According to the article, Hubble was observing a black hole when it detected a clear signal of people screaming. Obviously, these were the tortured souls of the damned in hell.

Ignoring for the moment (or forever) the silliness of Hubble picking up sounds at all, especially from hell, the best part of the article for me was the accompanying picture of a Hubble image of Supernova 1987a, a star that exploded in 1987. I studied this object for four years for my Ph.D., analyzing Hubble images and spectra. I sometimes worked until late at night trying to decipher what I saw, pounding my head on my computer screen in hopes of shaking loose some rusty cog in my brain. I never heard any tortured screams except my own.

So the last thing I need is for the Weekly World News to tell me that Hubble images of Supernova 1987a were hell. I wrote a whole thesis about it!

23. Star Hustlers: Star Naming for Dummies

When I was in high school, I had friend who was an expert on movies. He knew everything about every movie I had ever heard of. Director, actors, music, set design — the depth of his knowledge was amazing. One night at my house we were using my telescope and I said, “Let’s take a look at Albireo. It’s a cool doublestar.” I swung the telescope around and in a minute or two had it in the eyepiece. He stepped up to the eyepiece and took a moment to look at the pretty double. When he backed up, he took a look at the sky and said, “How in the world did you know where that star was? Look at all of them!”

I glanced up, and simply asked, “Who directed From Here to Eternity?”

Without missing a beat he replied, “Fred Zinnemann.” He paused for a moment and then smiled. “Right,” he said.

He understood. I knew the stars because I’m familiar with them. Reading the sky is like reading a map; after a while you know your way around. After you’ve seen a movie enough times, you get to know the characters, and if you’re interested enough you’ll learn details that not many other people know.

Decades later, I can make my daughter smile by pointing out stars to her. She wants to know their names, and I tell her. She repeats the name after me, but moves on to another star as quickly as she can. She wants to know all their names.

That’s a tall order. There’s no shortage of stars in the night sky. A keen-eyed observer — if the conditions are right — can see several thousand stars with the unaided eye. With even a modest telescope, hundreds of thousands of individual stars can be seen. The Hubble Space Telescope, in order to stay pointed at a target, employs a guide-star catalog that contains tens of millions of stars. As you’d imagine, naming them all can be quite a challenge.

But not for everyone. There are companies that offer to sell you the right to name a star after someone — yourself, perhaps, or a loved one or friend. For a fee, and not necessarily a small one, you receive a certificate authenticating some star in the heavens with the name you bestow on it. Some companies even give you the coordinates of your star and a stylish map so you can find it. There are many organizations like this, and one thing most have in common is that they strongly imply — and some come right out and say — that this star is now officially named after you. Congratulations!

But does that star really have your name? If you think so, I strongly urge you to close this book and read its title to yourself, out loud. Maybe twice.

The answer, of course, is no. The naming of stars is not a haphazard business. There is an organization called the International Astronomical Union that is in charge of giving celestial objects their official names. And by official, I mean the name that will commonly be used by professional astronomers when they refer to the object. There are rules for naming objects; asteroids, moon, comets, even craters on other planets get named in a certain way.

Stars typically have some sort of catalog name. As it happens, practically every star you can see with a modest telescope already has a name, or more properly a designation. Usually they are named for their position in the sky, which would be sort of like naming a tiny island after its longitude and latitude. Only the brightest ones, visible to the naked eye, might have proper names like Betelgeuse, Vega, or Polaris.

Most stars are named using Greek letters and the name of the constellation, like the famous Alpha Centauri or the not-so-famous Sigma Octans. The brightest star in the constellation is called Alpha, the second brightest is Beta, and so on. Those letters run out quickly, and so numbers are used after that. John Flamsteed was a seventeenth-century astronomer who catalogued thousands of stars, and many still bear his name. Over 300,000 fainter ones are listed in the German Bonner Durchmusterung catalog and bear the initials “BD” before a number representing their coordinates. Thousands of stars are in the Henry Draper catalog, named in honor of an astronomer who was among the first to use the new tool of spectroscopy in the 1870s (and who also took the first photograph of the Orion Nebula, 84 years to the day before I was born). These stars have the letters “HD” in front of a number representing their position on the sky.