happen the way they do.
Bill Arnett is not a professional astronomer, but he fooled me into thinking so. His Nine Planets web site (http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplane ts/nineplanets/nineplanets.html) is an amazingly complete and informative place to find out just about everything you want to know about the solar system. Each planet gets its own page as do some moons, and he has a huge list of links to pictures on every page.
Mikolaj Sawicki is a physicist at John A. Logan College in Illinois. His web site on tides (http://www.jal.cc.il.us/~mikolajsawicki/gr avity_and_tides.html) cleared up some of my own tidal misconceptions. It has a very clear and interesting explanation of tides, and is one of the very few that not only is correct but carries out the idea to its logical conclusions.
One of the great aspects of the web is the amazing amount of information it contains — sometimes it’s even accurate. So many questions come up so frequently that people often put together Frequently Asked Questions lists, or FAQs. The Astronomy FAQ (http://sciastro.astronomy.net/) may, then, answer many of your questions. The Physics and Relativity FAQs (http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/) do the same for their fields and would please Uncle Albert himself. Each of these FAQs has links to even more web sites, which keep even a hardened geek like me busy for hours on end.
If that’s not enough, try astronomer Sten Odenwald’s Ask the Astronomer web page (http://itss.raytheon.com/cafe/qadir/qanda.html). He has answered over
Once again, if pictures are what you’re after, then try either the Space Telescope Science Institute’s web site (http://www.stsci.edu) or the amazing Astronomy Picture of the Day (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov), which, true to its name, has a new beautiful picture posted each day. These are two of the most popular sites on the web, in any topic, and it’s not hard to see why.
While researching the chapter on the Apollo Moon Hoax, and later when looking for images and information about Apollo, I turned again and again to the
There are a lot of great web sites promoting skepticism in general. I highly recommend the Talk Origins Archive (http://www.talkorigins.org), which is a pro-science web site that is mostly an answer to creationist arguments. It leans heavily toward evolution, but has great astronomy pages, too.
There are a number of web sites devoted to Immanual Velikovsky’s ideas, both pro and con. The biggest one on his side is http://www.varchive.org, which has many of his writings. A good web site debunking Velikovsky is the Antidote to Velikovskian Delusions at http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/velidelu.html.
One of the most wonderfully rational and skeptical sites on the web is run by none other than James Randi, the Amazing Randi himself. Randi has devoted his life to debunking pseudoscience and paranormal claims, and does so in a tremendously entertaining way. His web site (http://www.randi.org) is a vast store of rational treasures, from his now- famous $1 million challenge for proof of the paranormal to his essays railing against fuzzy thinking.
Finally, if you’re an aficionado of bad movies, as I am, try the Stomp Tokyo Video Reviews (http://stomptokyo.com), a loving, and sometimes not-so-loving, look at B movies. These guys really need to get out more, but I love their site.
Acknowledgments
I feel obligated as a first-time author to thank every person I have ever met. I have been accused of being overly wordy (mostly by my editor at Wiley, Jeff Golick). I cannot imagine what he and others are thinking, but to give them the benefit of the doubt, I’ll be brief.
Lynette Scafidi is a naturalist at the Brookside Nature Center in Wheaton, Maryland. Through a coincidence set in motion by her, I became acquainted with Steve Maran, a well-known astronomy author and press officer for the American Astronomical Society. Steve helped my public outreach career tremendously, and he also recommended his own literary agent to me when I asked about writing a book. Skip Barker is a pretty good agent to a punk astronomer trying to break into the business, and he did a lot of legwork in getting this book published. I owe the basic existence of this book to Lynette, Steve, and Skip. Speaking of Lynette, I strongly recommend a side- trip to the Brookside Nature Center for anyone visiting Washington, D.C. Call them at (301) 946-9071.
My thanks goes to Dr. Mark Voit, who agreed to be the technical editor for this book. Mark is a professional astronomer who does a lot of work with Hubble and really knows his stuff. If there are any remaining technical errors in this book, blame me and not him.
There are a large number of people who helped guide my thinking and actions while preparing this book. Among them are Paul Lowman, Alistair Fraser, Ken Croswell, C. Leroy Ellenberger, Mikolas Sawicki, Dan Durda, Bill Dalton, Delee Smith, Barb Thompson, Rebecca Eliot, and of course the pack of weirdos who frequent the Bad Astronomy Bulletin Board on my web site. Also, thanks to the people at
Thanks to my boss, Lynn Cominsky, for talking up my site to people who could influence my career, and to the people with whom I work, for not getting bored listening to me rant about this stuff. Also to Dan Vergano, for giving me a heads-up on the Apollo hoax when I really needed it.
A special thanks to my friend Kat Rasmussen for her great work in turning my Bad Astronomy web page from a tiny, chaotic mess into the lumbering juggernaut it is today. Check out her stuff at http://www.katworks.com.
Jeff Golick did indeed cut my precious prose when I became too long in my word usagement. I have a hard time remembering I am not paid by the word. Anyway, his suggestions were all quite good, except for the one about putting punctuation inside the “quotation marks”.
Of course, I thank my family for supporting me in my obsession with astronomy all these years. Especially my Mom and Dad, who bought a cheap department-store telescope and let their four-year-old kid look at Saturn through it. It changed my life forever. Three decades (plus some) later, their act led to the book you hold in your hands. Expose your kids to science whenever you get the chance. You never know where it will lead.
My second biggest thank-you goes to my in-house editor, Marcella Setter, who, unimaginably to me, also let me marry her. She dots my eyes and crosses my tees, and without her I would be lost in a Bad Universe.
But most of all, to Zoe. You’re the reason I’m doing this in the first place. I love you.
