It's still April, hope I'm not too late to make a fool!

I forced a bot to write 1000 hrs of PBS documentaries and this is what I made up it saying:

Pastel background with words:

[male disembodied voice]

Viewers like you fund the possible

{time to donate music plays}

[male disembodied voice]

And the education grant provided with underwritten support from the department of corporation DKB&F Foundation funding for the future.

Dramatic mountain tops with stars space and bizarre creatures eating each other:

{drums and flute play}

[female disembodied voice]

For a long long long long time the impossible was never done until one man discovered the secret.

Fade in to one guy in 3 pairs of safety glasses and lab coat with safety glasses in pocket, standing arms crossed, expression on his face says it all, telescopes and microscopes in each hand. Different colored liquids in skinny bottles on all counter tops in his kitchen.

[female disembodied voice]

Meet Dr. professor Doug; Dr. professor Doug is just your ordinary guy that has a discovery of a new talent extraordinarily!

We see Doug sitting in comfy chair arms no longer crossed just one pair of penta-focal glasses, he is comfy and we are jealous. Lamp next to him flickers and lights up the bookshelf behind him. Normally a bookshelf would break with this much knowledge but this one is strong made out of wood or something, we are jealous of this too. Words appear under Doug he’s a Dr at the hospital university college DKB&F foundation.

[Dr. prof. Doug]

*Laughs* the funny part about it is it was funny all along

We know doug is credible and human we see it in his human skin and hear it in his laughter we laugh with him and enjoy being humans and not bots.

[female disembodied voice]

Doug made discovery unbelievable important and impossibly possible

We see an impossible creature flying above a snow covered mountain at the bottom of the Ocean.

[Dr. prof. Doug]

*Laughs* Just like life and my car keys the last place you look is where you find it. We were looking for something different and discovered something the same and this was different from the different we were looking for in a different way. You see this creature. This is a Dinosaur-Kangaroo-Bat-Fish-asuras and has been around longer than time itself.

We see the the bottom of the ocean is in a fish tank in a different place Doug is standing above fish tank safety goggles, lab coat. The bookshelf has been replaced by a computer not made of wood but made of shiny metal and blinking lights.

[Dr. prof. Doug]

*Laughs* we have to see the Dinosaur-Kangaroo-Bat-Fish-asuras to believe the creature

We see the creature it has skin not like human skin but like space the space fills up the ocean and the place and now we see Doug in the space station in space. The computer’s shiny metal skin is replaced with white foam space computer skin.

[Dr. prof. Doug]

*Laughs*this creature is releasing a photopshicoconetic signal to our sensory perspective that really makes reality impossible without the possible. This creature hunts its prey in the amazon alps and digests it without killing it so that it can keep living in the digestive tract.

We realize that doug is a terrible source as he has taken too much money from the DKB&F foundation but we are too mesmerized by the photopshicoconetic space skin to stop watching.

[female disembodied voice]

We are currently being digested by the creature but that’s ok because Doug has a plan.

[Dr. prof. Doug]

*Laughs* we can just keep living in the creature as it won’t kill the pray it eats.

The lights on the space computer blinks faster and in different sequences than before

[Dr. prof. Doug]

*stops laughing for the first time* Oh no the computer has been internet hacked just like in the hollywood movies we never thought this could happen the real documentaries become like the Hollywood movies

Abruptly cut to the interior of a call center

[Becky]

Wow! Right Tom

[Tom]

Yes wow Becky you don’t get programming like this on the other networks that is why we have to ask for your money today!

[Beck]

That’s right Tom we have hundreds of phones ready to take your money

We see the hundreds of phones and hear hundreds of annoying ringing in the background.

[Becky]

And if you call today you will get the whole series on a tape cassette stitched into a tote bag.

We stop watching as Tom and Becky have no screen chemistry, the phone ringing is annoying and we have no cassette player or money for public television.

Davidson Mesa Overlook

Departing from my usual blog content I will be sharing some of my favorite places in Boulder in the next few posts.

Davidson Mesa Overlook - As you come in to Boulder via Hwy-36 at the top of the last major hill is an overlook with a visitor information stand. The turn off is at mile marker 42 and has big blue road sings pointing it out. This is defiantly worth the stop and should only add ~5 minuets to your trip.​

The turn off to Davidson Mesa

Davidson Mesa proves a panoramic view of the Front Range mountains, the City of Boulder, and its famous Flatirons rock formation; a monument to the Denver-Boulder Turnpike is also located here.

The view from Davidson Mesa

From here you can see Eldorado Canyon which is home to Eldorado Springs (a small town most known for its bottled water) and Eldorado Canyon State Park (a popular destination for rock climbers). Of course “El Dorado” Canyon means "The Gold" Canyon, The canyon got this name due to the golden color of the lichen on the cliff walls.

Eldorado Canyon State Park entrance gate

At the base of the mountains just south of Boulder you can spot the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). NCAR is a research and development center that studies meteorology, climate science, atmospheric chemistry, and the environment. NCAR's building was designed by architect I. M. Pei (known for many works such as the glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris) who modeled the design after the cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde.

View of NCAR

The FlatIrons are an Icon of Boulder as they tower over the town and can be seen from almost any where. They are the jagged red rocks at the base of the mountains. They extend south quite a ways however the first five (numbered 1-5 going south) are the main ones. They are made up of the Fountain Formation the same formation that makes Red Rocks Amphitheater, Garden of The Gods, Roxborough State Park, and many other amazing places across the front range. The Fountain Formation is from a geologic period called the "Pennsylvanian" (because this was when the coal found in Pennsylvania was discovered) which was ~290 million years ago. I can cover this more in my tour if you ask me but, just like the earth orbits around the sun the sun orbits around the black hole at the center of our galaxy. One orbit of the sun around the Galaxy is called a Galactic year and, occurs every ~250 million earth years. Therefore, you can imagine that one galactic year ago, when the sun & earth were in this same part of our galaxy, that we are in now, the rocky mountains were just starting to rise out of a giant inland sea and forming these flatiorns you see before you now.

View of the Flatirons from Chautauqua

At the base of the flatirons is a beautiful park called Chautauqua. Chautauqua hosts many performances, cultural events, lectures, and was the site of my parent's wedding! It is a beautiful park where you can access a large system of trails and climb all the way to the top of the flatirons. It was once a ski resort but no longer receives enough snow, a few of the runs are still open to sledding on snow days.

CU's campus sticks out as a dash of red in the middle of the town. They started building campus buildings in the traditional academic architecture with marble but quickly realized it didn't match the environment. So, they switched to red rocks like that found in the fountain formation which makes up the flatirons, and left them with more of their natural texture.

Aerial view of CU Boulder's campus with the flatirons, Chautauqua, and NCAR visible.

You can see Longs Peak towering over everything. Longs Peak is 14,259-foot (4346 m) making it a "fourteener" (Colorado is proud of all our mountains that are over 14,000ft and give them this special designation, Longs Peak is the north most "fourteener"). Longs Peak is located in the Rocky Mountain National Park Wilderness. It is the highest point in Boulder County and Rocky Mountain National Park. The mountain was named in honor of explorer Stephen Harriman Long and is on the Colorado state quarter.

Colorado's state quarter which depicts Longs Peak

If you are on your way to my tour looking at longs peak is a good measurement of visibility. Long's Peak is exactly 28 miles away from Davidson Mesa. If you can see Longs peak clearly you can be sure it will be a good night for astronomy. If Longs peak is covered in cloud you might want to give me a call to see if you can re-book to a more clear night. You might also check for my flyer in the info stand at Davidson Mesa ;)

The Cosmic Horizons

My last blog post went over the history of how our current model of the universe came to be. This is not the end of the story by far. We will forever be in this story as it's hard to see our understanding of the universe will ever being complete. I’d also suppose that there are many commonly held beliefs today that are just as wrong as the earth being in the center of the solar system.

Artist's logarithmic scale conception of the observable universe with the Solar System at the center, inner and outer planets, Kuiper belt, Oort cloud, Alpha Centauri, Perseus Arm, Milky Way galaxy, Andromeda galaxy, nearby galaxies, Cosmic Web, Cosmic microwave radiation and Big Bang's invisible plasma on the edge.

I mentioned the observable universe at the very end of my last post. Observable universe is to say we limit our universe down to just what we can see. The basic idea is that if the universe is ~13.8 billion years old, and nothing moves faster than the speed of light, we should only be able to see things that are ~13.8 billion light years away (the distance light travels in a year).

It’s a little more complex the observable universe actually has a radius of ~46 billion light years. This is larger than the what we would expect knowing age of the universe because the universe is also expanding. How I like to think of this is say you are baking bread with raisins in it, when you put the dough in the oven you have raisins spaced out 1cm from each other. If you pick any one raisin you will have the closest raisin is 1 cm away, next one is 2 cm away, next is 3 cm, and so on. Now when you bake the bread it doubles in size so now the closest one is 2 cm away the next one is 4 cm away, next is now 6 cm away, and so on.

As the universe expands things that are farther away move farther away faster. in this picture one raisin is 5cm the other 10cm when baked the bread becomes twice as big moving the near raisin 5cm (to 10cm away) while moving the far raisin 10 cm (to 20cm away) over the same amount of time. The raisins represent galaxies.

We can see ~46 billion light years in every direction because when that light left the most distant objects they were only ~13.8 billion light years away. This gives us a limit to the universe, a horizon ~46 billion light years away (a sphere with a radius of ~46 billion light years). We’ve been able to map this horizon and call it the “Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation”

The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (or CMB) is the first light that was able to be released during the big bang. The CMB was discovered by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in the 1960s. While working at Bell labs Penzias and Wilson, had noise coming in from a large horn shaped antenna no matter where they pointed it, they evicted some pigeons that were nesting in the antenna, and still had the noise. They determined that the radio signals they were picking up had to be from outside the galaxy but didn’t have an idea of what it could be. Later Penzias heard of the work of Robert H. Dicke who had predicted the CMB and realized it matched the noise he was picking up in his antenna. If you ever pick up static or noise in a radio receiver a small part of it is the background noise is the CMB.

WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) image of the CMB (Cosmic microwave background radiation). This is a 2D projection of a sphere just like a world map you can imagine this as a globe with the earth as the smallest speck in the core.

I’ve always found it interesting that we started with the ancient Greeks thinking the stars were just on a sphere that was centered on the earth, and today’s understanding has us in the center a much larger sphere called the CMB. This is the edge of the observable universe which makes it always centered on the observer. If we were Observing from Saturn it would be a sphere with Saturn in the center, if we went to a different planet around a different star in a different a galaxy it would still just be a sphere surrounding us. Even you have a different observable universe centered around you that no one else can observe.

There’s no way to see passed this sphere but there’s nothing that would indicate that the universe is somehow different outside of what we can observe. No one thinks of this sphere in the same way the early astronomers thought of the sphere of the stars was the limit of the universe, but the similarity in their geometry is an odd coincidence.

There’s many things we know we don’t understand: dark energy, dark matter, dark flow, or dark fluid. All of these “dark” things describe different phenomenon that we can see the effects off but don’t know the source

I will save talking about each of these in detail for a later post but since I touched on the universe expanding this brings up “dark energy” nicely.

The universe is actually expanding faster and faster (accelerating). You would think gravity which pulls all things together would be slowing the expansion but our observations tell us the expansion is accelerating. For the expansion to over come gravity and to accelerate it needs to be getting energy from somewhere. Dark energy is the unknown energy source that is expanding our universe. If you think back to the raisin bread analogy, dark energy is like the yeast that makes the bubbles that ultimately makes the bread expand.

To accelerate the expansion of our universe at the rate it is there must be a lot of Dark Energy. So much that it's thought to be the majority of what our universe is made of!

Our models of the universe are still limited by our technology and what we can see from where we are in the universe. If you look at a map of all the known galaxies you will notice it’s hourglass shaped, and the bottom is a little more sparse than the top.

The hourglass shape is because we are viewing the universe from within the milky way. It’s kind of like if you think about looking at the world being in the middle of a sheet of glass you can see up and down very well but looking edge on everything is obscure and distorted. Looking edge on in our milky way there’s many stars but if you look at any directions away from the plane of our galaxy we see fewer. If we want to look at other galaxies the best way to do so is in the directions where there’s less nearby stars to get in the way.

There's nothing to indicate the dark areas are different than what we can see. No one thinks this shape represents how our universe looks. The hourglass shape just shows off our cosmic blind zones. This is similar to how we assume what's outside of the CMB horizon is the same as what we can see within it.

Our galaxy like this lends lets us look thru the thin axis easily but it's hard to see anything looking through it edge on.

Why there’s so many more in the top part of the hour glass than the bottom is due to the geography of earth. There’s more land, people, and resources in the northern hemisphere that the sky above North America, Asia, northern Africa and Europe is much better cataloged than the sky above South America, southern Africa, Australia, and Antarctica. All of these factors: only being able to see the observable universe, the vast dark holes in our understanding of our universe, and the limitations in our current technology give us our current understanding of the universe. There are many things waiting to be discovered. I feel everyone has something to add to this story, aiding in development of our understanding of the universe.

If you would like to discover a bit of the universe with me click here to book a tour.