Meet Comet NEOWISE!

by Joan Marie Galat

A comet, often called a dirty snowball, is a frozen collection of rock, dust, and gases that orbits the Sun. When a comet approaches the Sun, heat causes the comet's shape to change. Frozen gases thaw, creating a tail that can stretch millions of kilometres into space. Now the comet looks like another one of its nicknames—a long-haired star!

    Night sky observers have been aware of comets for a very long time. Chinese astronomers kept records that show Halley’s Comet was observed in 240 B.C. Scientists are very interested in studying comets because they formed at the same time as our solar system. Their research may help scientists understand how the building blocks of life reached Earth.

    An exciting new comet was discovered on March 27, 2020. Visible with the naked eye from a dark location, the new comet, named NEOWISE, is five kilometres (three miles) wide, with a tail stretching hundreds to thousands of kilometres. Its name comes from the initials of NASA’s satellite observatory: the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. Though billions of comets exist, Comet NEOWISE is one of only 3,655 identified comets.

 

Observe NEOWISE

In the northern hemisphere, NEOWISE is visible in the northwest sky after sunset. You can find it in the vicinity of the Big Dipper. I was able to spot it with binoculars, which made it appear like a great, pale smudge across the sky. A telescope brings it into better focus, as seen in this photo taken near Cold Lake, Alberta, by Shaula Corr of aurorasbycorr.com(Visit Shaula's website to view more comet images. You can even order a framed print.)

    NASA offers tips on how to view NEOWISE, which will appear higher in the sky into August. Look soon because the comet is already dimming as it travels to the outer region of the solar system. Once it is out of sight, NEOWISE will not reappear for another 6800 years.

 

Quick Facts about Comets 

- Comets have egg-shaped orbits. 

- When a comet travels far enough away from the Sun, its tail will disappear.

 

- A comet that gets too close to a planet or the Sun may crash into it! 

 

-The center of a comet, called its nucleus, can be the size of a small town. When a comet gets close to the Sun, its head will grow larger than most planets.

 

- Meteor showers, which can last from hours to days, occur when Earth passes through a part of the sky where a comet left behind dust particles. That’s why meteor showers are visible around the same dates every year. 

 

Discover More about Space

I had the pleasure of writing about comets in my most recent book:  (National Geographic Kids). To discover how to go "dot-to-dot in the-sky" to use the constellations as a map to find comets and other night sky objects, see these titles in my You will also find tips for spotting meteors. Next time you see one, think of the comets that have passed through our part of the universe. Space is an amazing place!

Joan Marie Galat is the author of more than 20 books for children and adults. Many of her titles focus on astronomy, space, and other STEM/STEAM topics.

Countdown to launch of new Mars mission!

On Thursday July 30, NASA will be launching their newest probe with a mission on Mars! There are a terrific assortment of social media activities during the countdown, and lots of free materials to find online about this probe named Perseverance. The Perseverance mission is bringing along a tiny helicopter named Integrity, which will be the first helicopter to fly on Mars, when they get there in February 2021.

Here's a link to the NASA website with plenty of information. You can sign up to receive a countdown to Thursday's launch, or learn about the probe's mission, or watch the launch in real time and many videos at your leisure. Whether you want to learn a lot or just have a good time, this is a science website with lots of content.

Fans of science have an amazing assortment of learning materials and fun stuff available here. If you're more interested in comets or stars than you are in Mars, keep looking through NASA's website at http://www.nasa.gov where you can find links to pictures, videos, articles, and all sorts of information.

If you're on Twitter, check out the hashtag #CountdownToMars for updates all week.

Chauvet Cave Virtual Tour

by Paula Johanson

Are you interested in studying the lives of people from the Stone Age? Whether you're a scientist or just interested in learning something about archaeology, there are LOTS of ways to study the traces left by these people and their lives.

The best one I've found this week is a virtual tour of a cave in France called Chauvet. It's near the famous Lascaux cave, and like Lascaux it has astonishing images painted on the walls. Chauvet cave was closed off by a landslide thousands of years ago, so the images are well-preserved and undisturbed.

Take some time to go to this link at https://archeologie.culture.fr/chauvet/en to see a very detailed website. There's a menu tab on the left, that leads to a list of many short articles. There are details on the discovery of the cave, this region in France, replicas of the art, as well as a bibliography and glossary.

But if you can take yourself away from all these resources, the primary reason to go to this website is to take a virtual tour of Chauvet cave! On the walls of this cave are drawings in black or red, showing animals and scenes and markings drawn by people many thousands of years ago. Some marks are smudgy, some are precise, and all are interesting.

There is also a terrific website about archaeology, by the Bradshaw Foundation. Their section on Chauvet cave has many images and descriptions of the cave art.

Because Lascaux cave has been damaged by light, dust, and the breath of visitors, scientists have declared that Chauvet cave will be visited only by a very few experts. Each year only a handful of people enter the cave, to preserve the site. This virtual tour is available to everyone.

If you want to learn more about Chauvet cave and archaelogy, there are books available at your public library. That's where I found all three of these books on cave art that were recommended by the Bradshaw Foundation. Though these books are intended for adults, there's no reason a child can't look through the beautifully clear photographs and read a little here and there, especially with an adult. My own book The Paleolithic Revolution is a good choice for the first book to read on the lives of these long-ago humans, and it is a book well-suited to young people or to adults who are new to this topic.

Another way to tour Chauvet cave is to watch a Werner von Herzog film called Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Here's a link to the Wikipedia page on this amazing movie, directed by an award-winning film maker. The director was given permission to film inside the cave, using 3D techniques, which show something that photographs in books cannot show.

The paintings are not made on flat walls, but on surfaces that change how the drawings look. When an animal was drawn, the bumps and hollows on the wall filled out the shape or can change how it is seen. A light held in one hand can be moved to make the shadows change.

When the film was first released in 2010 I watched it in a theatre. The 3D effect of some scenes in this film makes me a little dizzy after a while, because I have an inner-ear problem. My husband had no trouble with dizziness, but he didn't know what the cave paintings looked like, so I found him a book and THEN he knew what he was seeing in the film. We have since then watched the film again, using our computers; bigger screens instead of tablets are worth it for this film!

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is available on Netflix. If you search in Google you can find excerpts from the film on YouTube and the entire film is available on DVD. Ask at your library or buy a copy.

My advice? First, look through this virtual tour of the cave. Then explore the Bradshaw website images or get a book with the cave paintings, like Chauvet Cave: The Art of Forgotten Times by Jean Clottes -- or something similar. I found books at the library! Then watch Cave of Forgotten Dreams on a big screen TV. Amazing.

Virtual Tour of an Asteroid

by Paula Johanson

When I was a child, I watched every Apollo launch. Each of the moon landings was celebrated in my home. If (like me) you've ever wished you could be an astronaut, there are lots of things to do with that dream. One way I connect with my inner astronaut is to go to this NASA website, Ryugu Trek.

Ryugu is an asteroid that has been visited by a space probe called Hayabusa2.  On the website Ryugu Trek, you can use your computer to look all around this rocky asteroid. Thousands of photographs have been worked together to create a virtual tour. You can change the image settings like a video game, to see what you'd see flying your own space probe over and around the surface of Ryugu.

Take a little time to check out this website! Click on this link to try the various tours and downloads available. It makes me feel like I understand more about the scientists studying the images of this stony little member of our solar system.

Drawing Conclusions and Other Ideas

by Raymond Nakamura

Drawing Conclusions and Other Ideas

“A picture is worth a thousand words” does not have the mathematical rigour of E=mc2, but it can be a useful rule of thumb for communicating science, among other things. Smart phones have made photos commonplace, but drawing what we see or think remains useful.

Observing and Drawing

Even if you are not Leonardo da Vinci (and who is), attempting to draw something in front of you forces you to pay attention. Is this doodad bigger than this gizmo? How many dangly bits are there? And so on.

When I took an undergraduate invertebrate zoology course (once upon a time before the Internet), drawing specimens was an integral part of labs.  It can be helpful to do things lightly in pencil first and then when you’ve figured things out, go over things in ink, like successive drafts of a text. I have kept my binder of drawings, partly because I am a hoarder and partly because drawings feel like they bits of me left in them.

Personal Notes, Invertebrate Zoology Sept. 1984

Thinking and Drawing

Sight is the dominant sense for most people and images can act as place holders for ideas. So drawing pictures while you are thinking can make it easier to come up with new connections, arrangements, or other ideas.

Paying attention while you draw can also help you remember the object you are drawing. If you look at something and then close your eyes, you probably can still remember what you saw. Do this over and over as you draw something and it can help you remember that object or the experience. Try taking a break from snapping photos to sit and draw something. If you don’t want people peeking over your shoulder to see what you are drawing, find a place to sit with your back against a wall.

Personal notebook, Alaska July 2012

Communicating and Drawing

Drawings can help share ideas with others. Computers can render images impersonal, but drawing a cartoon is like leaving a signature, as cartoonist Lynn Johnston has noted. A drawing is personal and can immediately establish the mood of a piece. 

Words and pictures can interact in different ways.

Sometimes the information is mostly conveyed by the image, whether an illustration or some kind of graph, where the words are mostly labels.

Sometimes the words carry most of the information and the pictures are more of an embellishment. Then you have situations where both the words and pictures are needed to understand the point.

Sometimes the pictures might say things very different from the text.

Words are obviously powerful and useful tools, but don’t forget about making pictures. I’ve been drawing cartoons on an iPad with an Apple pencil, but If you’re rusty, just try using a little notebook or a scrap piece of paper. It’s up to you to decide where to draw the line.

Collecting Ideas Together

by Paula Johanson

Most people think of science writing as writing about doing science or being a scientist. But some science writing is writing about how people think about science. This can be entertaining when you're reading a book by Stephen Jay Gould or Oliver Sacks. Learning how a scientist thinks about the process of discovering and teaching facts is informative and fun for those of us who are not career scientists!

There are other books about how people think about science -- people who are not scientists. It's less fun to read what some people think, but it is informative. It's important to be informed, not only about objective facts that have been carefully discovered and proved, but also about the kinds of opinions and actions people have based on these facts.

I was the editor for two of this kind of science book, for a series called Analyzing the Issues.

One book was called Critical Perspectives on the Opioid Epidemic. You can click here for a link to this book. The use of painkilling drugs has become an epidemic, with an increasing number of prescriptions being written as well as illegal use of street drugs. It's hard to know from news reports just how dangerous opioids can be or who is using them. For this book, I collected articles and book chapters that were written by doctors and health experts and court cases, as well as personal viewpoints of people affected in their ordinary lives. The idea was to make a book that would help families and older teens or students think critically about opioid use and abuse.

The second book was Critical Perspectives on Vaccinations. You can click here for a link to this book.

Vaccinations have been an issue in recent years, particularly in North America, where a few parents have decided not to vaccinate their children. According to health experts, this has led to an increase in potentially deadly diseases and an overall decrease in herd immunity. This text provides evidence from doctors and experts, along with scientific data, court cases, and viewpoints of everyday people, to help readers think carefully about this important issue.

For this book I was able to identify a major issue for parents: not knowing how to compare risks. They haven't learned the science of how to compare the major risk of their child catching measles with the tiny risk that their child is one of very few who should not be vaccinated. Luckily, it's not rocket science! Comparing risk is something we all can do. It's possible to choose good health care with confidence, with your doctor's help.

Through writing these books, I've come to understand better that some people don't have access to science. That's part of the reason why we contributors at Sci/Why are writing this blog: to show that information and ideas are not just for experts. Everyone can learn, and form opinions.