Crackpot

I've written several times now about the paranoid and gullible ravings of Coast-to-Coast, the late night radio show I've been addicted to for over a decade. Their territory: UFOs, Bigfoot, the chupacabra, hollow Earth theories. I don't listen because I believe it (though I do believe maybe 10% of the time). I listen because it's interesting and entertaining. I think of it as the bubbling Id of the true American psyche.

The CtC listeners are all abuzz about the Friday morning LCROSS impact on the moon. Some background: NASA is slamming a spacecraft into the south pole of the moon at 5600 mph, to kick up a plume of dust and see if it has water in it. It'll happen at 5:31 Friday morning MST, and should be bright enough to see if you have a big enough telescope, as the cloud is expected to rise 6 miles or more above the surface.

The crazy bit: CtC's resident space conspiracy theorist, Richard C. Hoagland, says that the real reason for the impact is so NASA can destroy their secret moon base there, used in the US's secret war on UFOs. Who knew? They want to get rid of any evidence of the base before other countries discover it. He goes on to say that the result will not be a 6 mile high cloud, but a huge fireball, as ammunition and fuel and oxygen ignite. So, if there's a huge flash at the bottom of the moon as you're going off to work tomorrow, well, you heard it here first.

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I will not be awake to watch the impact, though I am tempted. I'm on the right part of the globe, and my scope is at the bottom end of the range big enough to see it. If you are interested in trying to see it, NASA has a very informative page on how to do so (you can also watch it online). The crater is called Cabeus A, and I stole a picture from NASA and posted it above.

More Saturnian Weirdness

Something big and weird punched through Saturn's F-ring recently. Here's a picture.



To help you make sense of the image: the thing was approaching from below the ring, blasted through the ring and left a plume of material pointing toward the upper right hand corner of the picture, the plume is casting a shadow toward the lower lefthand corner.

No one knows what it is. Other than a great big space rock, probably.

I learned about it by listening to Phil Platt, of Bad Astronomy, on Coast to Coast last night (I got the pix from his site as well). For those of you not in the know, Coast to Coast is the gloriously strange radio show devoted to alien abductions, the Hollow Earth theory, the Taos Hum, Bigfoot, etc. It's about 80% silly, 20% interesting.

This is from the 20% interesting bit.

It comes on the heels of the comet slamming into Jupiter last month. Do I sense a pattern here? Did some passing object perturb the orbits of all those frozen space rocks at the edge of the Solar System? Are we about to be bombarded with shrapnel from the Oort Cloud?

Stay tuned.