Soap Film Magnified 150 Times

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PBS NewsHour just launched “PBS NewsHour Science” pbs.org/newshour/topic/science – the latest news in science, engineering and technology. We read about deaf dolphins, ancient volcanoes and an infant black hole. The site is mostly text but has some videos. We liked the photos of tiny things multiplied hundreds of times.

Features include:

• Breaking news stories
• Energy/Environment Corner
• Just Ask – a weekly Science Q&A
• Podcasts: download or subscribe to podcasts of all broadcast and online reports.
• Editor’s Choice: NewsHour editors select and feature the best reports and videos.
• NewsHour Extra: Links to lesson plans and student reporting.
• Twitter Feed: the Top 25 Science twitter feeds.

It uses the Android phone’s GPS locator and programming to calculate the position, line of sight, date and time. You can put your finger on the phone and point the Android around the sky to learn about other areas.  If you’re wondering where Mars is, you can click “search” and type “Mars.”

The Android is now the number two selling smart-phone, according to NPD Group, a consumer research company in New York. The Blackberry is still number one and the iPhone number three, You can get the Sky Map application at Google.com/sky/skymap.

 So we have been trying out a new device from telescope maker Meade (Meade.com). It’s called MySky Plus, and it looks like a ray gun from a sci-fi movie. It has a trigger and a viewing screen a little smaller than a business card. When you aim the gun at an object in the night sky and pull the trigger, MySky Plus will try to identify the target, show you a star map and provide a spoken explanation.

The MySky lists for $199, though we also saw it for $149 to $169 at various Internet stores. We’ve looked at other writers’ reviews of just what it is and what it does and noticed that none of them were right. It is nearly always described as a GPS device that explains what it sees in the night sky when you point it at some celestial object.

 Wrong, wrong, wrong. It is not a GPS device, it simply has a database of major locations around the world and you pick the one that’s closest to you. After all, being a few hundred miles away from a major city is an insignificant difference compared to the distances of space. And, since the device has no lens, it can’t “see” anything. If it were a true GPS, the location would change as you move.

What the MySky does is operate like a modern version of an 18th century sextant, a device with a curved scale marked in degrees, against which you moved a pointer. Sighting along the pointer at some known star or planet, you would read off its angle above the horizon. Then you would mark its elevation against the time and date, comsult your astronomical charts, and get a reasonably accurate fix on where you were. The MySky does much the same thing. When you point it at something in the sky, it registers the angle of inclination and compares that with your Earthly position. It next consults its clock and onboard database of star maps to tell you what you’re seeing.

This can be pretty exciting stuff, if often inaccurate. In short, this is a toy. It is a fun toy, and the descriptions and videos it provides are very educational, but nonetheless it’s a toy. When we searched for commentary from user groups, many adults expressed delight at learning about their night sky for the first time. One man was so excited when MySky informed him he was looking at Saturn, that he immediately went out and bought a telescope so he could see the rings. Actually, you can see the rings of Saturn with a pair of good binoculars, but his purchase of a telescope raises an interesting point: The MySky Plus sells for close to $200, but you can buy a pretty good telescope for around $100-$140.

Of course a good telescope (many of which are also made by Meade) will let you see the actual stars or planets but won’t tell you what you’re looking at. Some newspapers print brief descriptions of what can be seen in the night sky from their location. Public television also carries starry sky descriptions for some locations.

You can also get a good idea of what you’re looking at by downloading Google Earth from Earth.google.com/sky. Once installed, type a location and click the “sky” button to see maps and star names of what the night sky looks like from any place on Earth.

Almost everyone likes pictures of the stars and the planets. You need a telescope, of course, but once you have that, using a digital camera has big advantages.

A digital image can be manipulated in many ways, and there are lots of programs that can do it. Sharpness can be enhanced, false color images can be generated easily, and things not readily seen in a normal image can be brought out by filtering routines that separate parts of an image that may be only a single pixel apart in brightness. The book has plenty of pictures showing what can be done.

Almost everyone likes pictures of the stars and the planets. You need a telescope, of course, but once you have that, using a digital camera has big advantages.

A digital image can be manipulated in many ways, and there are lots of programs that can do it. Sharpness can be enhanced, false color images can be generated easily, and things not readily seen in a normal image can be brought out by filtering routines that separate parts of an image that may be only a single pixel apart in brightness. The book has plenty of pictures showing what can be done.

With no more suspense, it’s Samsung’s Jitterbug. This came out several months ago, but hasn’t had much in the way of press coverage. It’s not sleek, it’s not sexy and it’s not even slim, but it sure is easy to use. (And by the way, unheralded in all the iPhone coverage is that Samsung makes both the main processor and the memory for Apple’s $500 gadget.) At the moment the Jitterbug is available only in the United States, but that moment will expand.

We don’t need a phone that takes pictures or plays hit songs, and we don’t need the world to know we just saw the cutest gal or guy ever. We think cell phones are for making phone calls.

We’d had five cell phones, ranging in price from $39 to $420, and they all work — more or less. Some of them were so confusing we couldn’t figure out if we had messages. Our Virgin Mobile phone, made by Kyocera, starts by pushing a red button. A red button for starting? Most of the world associates red with stopping. Oh, well. We have a Sony Ericsson phone that takes pictures but requires something like seven steps to do it. Heaven help you if you want an emergency photo of the person attacking someone (maybe even you).

Which brings us back to the Jitterbug. It doesn’t take pictures, browse the Internet, show movies or play iTunes. A clear display on the outside shows us the time and whether or not we have messages. If someone is calling, it displays who it is if the person is in our stored list. You answer just by opening the phone, and the screen tells you to press “No” if you want to hang up.

You can order the phone with five contacts already on it and ask the operator to add more, or just fax the company a list. An up/down switch increases or lowers the volume, and if you press it up twice rapidly, the Jitterbug becomes a speaker phone. The battery is good for four hours of talk time and 11 days on standby.

You can dial anyone on your list by speaking a keyword. Say “home” and it dials home. The keypad on our model has large, easy-to-read numbers and buttons labeled “yes” and “no.” Their use is obvious.

Another version of this phone has no numbers, just three buttons: “911,” “Tow” and “Operator.” 911 is for calling the police and “Operator” connects you to an operator. The button that says “Tow” is for towing your stalled car, but you can order the phone with something else on that button, like “Dad.”

This is obviously not for your average teenager. But it is just right for people who are either too young or too old to bother with endless options or just can’t be bothered, period. The phone costs $147 from Jitterbug.com and service plans start at $10 a month. Voice mail is an extra $3. Other plans are on the Web site. This is going to be our phone; if we need pictures, we have a camera.

We spent a couple of nights trying out the new Sky Scout from Celestron, a leading maker of telescopes. It’s a beautifully made piece of optical and electronic equipment for scouting the nighttime sky. Turn it on and Sky Scout’s built-in GPS locator determines where you are and the time zone. Point the handheld device at something bright in the sky and Sky Scout, says the manual, will tell you what you’re looking at.

For our first try we pointed it at what our newspaper’s “night sky” section told us would be Jupiter, appearing above the eastern horizon. Sure enough, there it was, big and bright. Sky Scout’s digital display, however, informed us we were looking at a globular cluster 2,200 light-years from Earth. When we tried another object, we were informed it too was thousands of light-years away, though Bob was pretty sure it was Saturn, which is only light minutes away. (Note: You can see Saturn and its rings with a top pair of binoculars, so this was not a tough test.)

Later the next evening, as the old silent movie signs would read, we tried our luck from a beach 14 miles outside Chicago. The device gave us a message saying there was too much magnetic interference to pinpoint our location (what magnetic interference?), but after a while it found us. We then pointed Sky Scout at the moon, a pretty big target. Apparently it wasn’t the moon, because the Sky Scout display informed us we were looking at the binary star Theta Aurigae, 173 light-years away. Gosh, it sure looked like the moon.

The device has tons of rave reviews from users commenting at Amazon.com. Amazon is selling it for $399, by the way. The rave reviews make us wonder, as we have many times before, just who posts them. They must be from a different planet, because on our humble orb, this one goes in the techno-junk pile. There’s a slight chance that our unit is defective, the company told us, and they would send another one. But it’s been several weeks, and we’ve stopped holding our breath.