This episode is just 6 seconds short of a full hour. I interview Expat – who was my first guest ever back in Episode 10 – about numerous political and technological conspiracies of Richard Hoagland as generally applied to NASA. I learned quite a bit during this interview, and I hope that you do, too, and find it interesting as well.
There’s a quick New News item at the end, but all the other segments are skipped so as not to detract from Expat.
Upcoming episodes that I mentioned at the end include: the True Color of Mars, the Ringmakers of Saturn, 2012 Doomsday Revisited, a Young-Earth Creationist suing NASA, and a Nancy Leider clip show.
Lens Flares are present when they shouldn’t be because they were using the best possible lenses
The backgrounds in some photos aren’t right …
Who took Video of Neil Armstrong Descending onto the Moon and the LM lifting off the Moon?
The American Flag is Always Lit Regardless of Side
There Are No Stars!
The “C” Rock.
This is also a “full-fledged action-packed” episode featuring all other segments: New News, Q&A, Feedback, Puzzler, and an announcement.
The announcement is: Though it’s a bit early to say for certain we’re not all going to die this December 21, I’m starting to look for back-peddling by doomsday proponents for a follow-up episode very early next year. If anyone listening to this podcast happens to come across something by anyone who claimed stuff like Planet X would cause a pole flip, a big solar storm would wipe us out, or even on the positive side that we’ll all be able to levitate and do instant healing, and you see these people start to make up excuses for why it’s not happening, please send it in!
P.S. I tried a new noise removal setting in this episode as well as a different equalizer. I also saved it at slightly higher bitrate. Let me know if there are still issues, or if the audio at least sounds any better.
The year was 1983, and just five months before a plucky young astro/geophysicist was born, NASA launched the InfraRed Astronomical Satellite (IRAS). Over the next 10 months, the satellite observed nearly the entire sky in wavelengths of light never before measured for astronomy, and it found over a quarter-million objects. Late in 1983, an announcement was made about a potential discovery of a planet on the outskirts of our solar system, but this was quickly covered up.
Was this the real and true discovery of Planet X? Is NASA trying to hide this, even though the news reports from the time still exist and all the IRAS data are publicly available?
This episode also saw the return of New News, Q&A, Feedback, a Puzzler, and it even had an Announcement or two!
The next episode will be my interview with Dr. Brian Hynek who will be discussing astrobiology, how we search for life, and why Mars is supposedly so important. If you happen to read this before November 3, feel free to use the Comments section to suggest potential questions you’re interested in that I can ask him.
Episode 44 has been posted, a tad early. I recorded this episode almost a week ago, and I’m posting it now roughly on time, though a bit early, when I happen to have internet at this conference where it costs $13/day/device (yes, seriously).
Anyway, this episode ended up being surprisingly short even though I go through four of the primary ways that I use to demonstrate that people really landed on the Moon with the Apollo program (I would say “prove” but I’m very cautious using that word these days — real “proof” only comes in mathematics). The four methods I use are ultraviolet photos of stars, the rocks, lunar laser ranging, and actual photos of the sites from lunar orbit.
There’s also a Q&A, puzzler (solution to last puzzler and this one will be in July 24th’s episode), and the main segment. Otherwise, that’s about it and perhaps why it came in at about 21 minutes.
My Photos and Video from the May 20, 2012, Annular Eclipse
With two friends, I drove 480 miles south to just outside of Albuquerque, NM (Richard C. Hoagland territory!). We were in the path of full annularity, and we set up in a beautiful spot with no people around us and clear sight to the western horizon.
I took a long sequence of photos and created a few montages and even a movie. I’m only posting three of the montages (I don’t like the third one, but I’m posting it anyway). These are only 6% full size, and you can only get to it by clicking on the image to have it open in a new browser. The full-res versions are suitable for printing at 72″ wide at 300ppi … that’s a lot of pixels and brings my computer to a crawl when I open it.
Annular Solar Eclipse Montage, Type 0, Version 1.3 (click to embiggen)
Annular Solar Eclipse Montage, Type 2c, Version 1.3 (click to embiggen)
Annular Solar Eclipse Montage, Type 4, Version 1.1 (click to embiggen)
And here’s the movie:
I’m not going to go into image processing details here. If you’re interested, I posted a lengthy thread about it here that goes through all the gritty details.
Relevance to the Crazy Conspiracy
I’ve not addressed this conspiracy before on this blog, but I have in my podcast, Episode #24, “Help! The Sun (or Moon) Is Moving!” The premise is, as I said before, that the sun and/or moon is no longer rising or setting or in the sky where it previously was, or where it’s “supposed” to be.
The answer to this is that it always shifts position though the cycle repeats annually. It shifts because Earth’s axis is constantly pointing towards the North Celestial Pole, so as Earth orbits around the sun over the course of a year, the angle the sun makes with the horizon changes. It rises and sets closer to your hemisphere’s pole during your hemisphere’s summer, and vice versa.
The implication by most conpsiracists that I’ve heard – if they have an implication other than generally “something’s happening that NASA’s covering up!” – is that we are in the midst of a geographic pole shift that THEY don’t want you to know about. Again, I’ve addressed pole shifts before (such as here or here).
And, at least since I’ve been using the site for the last decade, they’ve all been 100% accurate! The point is that this would not be possible at all if we were undergoing a pole shift. Even a tiny pole shift, where I’m defining “tiny” by, say, 1° which would not be noticeable to these people claiming the sun/moon is in the wrong place, would shift the path of solar eclipses by a non-trivial amount.
And yet, these eclipses continue to demonstrably and perhaps stubbornly be where they were predicted to be decades ago.
Final Thoughts
This is something that I like about science and get a great sense of “ah ha!” when I come across it: Conspiracists, pseudoscientists, and others who claim to be re-writing science do so in isolation. They do not realize – or they choose to ignore – what the implications would be for their claims outside of their one phenomenon.
In this case, if Earth were undergoing any sort of geographic pole shift, the annular solar eclipse that we witnessed last weekend would not have taken place where it had been predicted. A shift of 1° of the poles would have shifted the eclipse’s path by around 70 miles (110 km). If we were in a pole shift of more than around 0.5°, I would not have seen the moon completely within the sun’s disk from where I was in Albuquerque.
And it’s really as simple as that. Claims in science do not exist in isolation. You must carry them through and apply them to all other things that rely upon that data.
Slightly late, episode 35 has been posted. I go over four photography claims dealing with crosshairs and shadows.
I’m also considering experimenting with making this episode (and potentially some other visual ones) into YouTube-type videos. Let me know what you think.
Oh, and this episode introduces a new segment — new news related to previous episodes.
This episode is what I set out to be a fun, short episode, but spiraled into a lengthy discussion of geometry. I hope that it’s somewhat understandable. It is a discussion of the perhaps infrequent but still “out there” claim that the sun or moon is rising or setting in a different location than it/they used to.
