Comet Conspiracy Crack-Up
April 11, 2011 2 Comments
Well you’ve probably heard a fair bit about Comet Elenin C/2010 X1 discovered in 2010 by Russian Astronomer Leonid Elenin. There is a fair amount of bullshit being talked about this comet, including the fact that there are the letters ELE in the name. For those of you who haven’t seen the film Deep Impact ELE in the name Elenin is supposed to stand for Extinction Level Event and according to conspiracy theorists has been incorporated into the name because the comet is coming to kill us all.
Now come on people, if there is a grand conspiracy let loose in the world they aren’t going to let things slip in what’s supposed to be the end game. They might as well have called the comet ‘A great big bastard that’s going to kill all of you little people’.
Being ex military myself I do know how much the military mentality can screw things up. I am also a firm believer that most intelligence agencies could probably be prosecuted under the Trades’ Descriptions Act (they should at least have a notice that their findings are ‘for entertainment purposes only’). However the military and the intelligence agencies have had quite a fair bit of experience keeping things secret and one of the ways tends to be by not using obvious names. The Gadget, was used during the Manhattan Project to describe the nuclear bomb and Tank actually became the name of what we now know of as tanks rather than big metal motorised killing things with guns. If Elenin was something nasty coming our way I don’t think they would have slipped up so blatantly… probably it would have ended up being called something in Icelandic that no one can pronounce and no one can spell, just to bugger up the possibility of successful Google searches.
Ok next we hit the possibility that Comet Elenin is a Brown Dwarf Star rather than a comet. Yes a Brown Dwarf Star is a star is somewhat difficult to distinguish from a large planet visually. They are believed to be roughly the same diameter as Jupiter, but with a lot more mass.
How much more mass?
The smallest Brown Dwarf is around 8x the mass of Jupiter, the largest around 65x. Just going on the gravitational effects such an object would have on the solar system, it’d be bleeding obvious. Visually it might not be anything spectacular, but at a distance of just over 2 AU’s at opposition on March 14th half the distance of Jupiter at opposition it would be easily visible as a disk in binoculars. Even if you somehow decide that all of this brown dwarf’s emissions were in the infrared rather than the visual spectrum and that it reflects absolutely no light from the sun it would now have an apparent diameter approaching 2 arc-minutes you’re starting to get an object that would be noticeable as it occulted background stars. That is of course if it isn’t radiating enough infra-red to be picked up on non astronomical infra-red kit at high altitudes.
Ok the last couple of things I’m going to deal with are some of the silliest shit out there, some of it peddled by a gentleman by going by the name of Astrolpatriot. AP tends to think of himself as a serious astronomer, he’s got a telescope the lot and to be fair his telescope is a nice little telescope. He does tend to talk fair bit of crap about his scope, mixing up different breeds and models, but the only one that I have seen in his videos is a Meade ETX. I can’t tell if it’s the ETX-90 or ETX-125, but that is of little importance. Either of these ETX models will happily give you a wonderful view of Jupiter and it’s moons, you’ll see Saturn in all her ringed glory (though you’re not really going to be able to crank up the magnification) and if you’re really lucky you might get to see Uranus and Neptune as small disks.
However if you’re looking for faint fuzzy objects I’m afraid you’ve been lied to, size does matter.
The ladies out there might agree, length isn’t particularly an issue but width is very important, especially when you’re looking for faint objects. Elenin at the moment is somewhere between 16th and 17th magnitude, which means that Pluto is a fair bit brighter at a magnitude of 15.1. On 5th April Alan Hale (co-discoverer of comet Hale Bopp) was unable to pick Elenin out visually with his 41cm telescope… so why aren’t I surprised that Astrolpatriot can’t find it weeks earlier with his telescope of all of 12.5cm? Faint fuzzy objects need dark skies, good atmospheric conditions and damn big telescopes. If Astrolpatriot knows so little of astronomy that he thinks he should be able to pick out Elenin with his toy I wouldn’t trust him to find Polaris without using the GOTO function on his scope.
As for the rest of the crap he and the rest talk, it’s just that crap… scaremongering bullshit… there isn’t going to be days of darkness (that was the story Nightfall originally by Isaac Asimov), it isn’t a hollow spaceship under intelligent control (that was Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke) and it isn’t coming to hit the Earth as in the films Deep Impact and Armageddon. If however you are gullible to buy into any of these fabrications I do happen to have a genuine empty baked bean tin (Tesco Value Beans) that might have magic powers (it’s never been proved not to have magic powers anyway) and with times being so hard I might be willing to part with it for as little as £50…
Okay. Fair enough.
But I speak for a lot of people, I’m sure, who would like someone to post images (maybe updated once a week) of this comet, with its location with the image (and maybe one or two labeled guidestars in the images as well).
That way no-ones buggering around and losing sleep over the whole thing. Given that everyone’s so wound up about it all, why can’t someone do that?
The main reason that so many people with an interest in astronomy won’t associate with ‘believers’ (and explain things in the very small words that are needed) is the same reason that Arthur didn’t go to Camelot in ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ because “Tis a silly place”. Have you ever tried explaining anything involving millions of years to a young earth creationist? Have a Google of Nancy Lieder and her predictions about Hale-Bopp and how wrong she was… and she’s still peddling her shit at http://poleshift.ning.com and people are still buying the crap over ten years since she was proved wrong on Hale-Bopp and eight years since she told everyone to kill all of their pets because the pole shift was coming
Hale-Bopp was a very pretty comet and the only people who died because of its arrival were those who took their own lives because they believed shit they’d been sold.
There are sites out there that put up regular images of Elenin, have a look at http://spaceobs.org Leonid Elenin tends to hang around there. As for understanding the images ask nicely and people will explain, but don’t think it’s their responsibility to allow you a good night’s sleep.
I presume you’re an adult and despite any unusual or unconventional beliefs you might have you seem to be mentally capable, so checking under the bed for the boogyman is your responsibility, as is locking the doors and tucking yourself in. The sky of course is free and if this is the end of the world then money doesn’t mean a damn thing. For a mere £5000 I’m damn sure I could advise you on the kit you’d need to image Elenin tonight, but if you did spend £5000 of your own money I’m not going to demand you image what I want to see… no more than I’d demand you take your time and your money to prove to me that Belgium exists (because I think Belgium is all a sneaky plot by those nasty Americans). If I want to see if Belgium exists (and I won’t take any one else’s word for it) it’s up to me to get up of my arse and check.
The last option of course (if all the evidence and explanations out there do not convince you) is I will quite happily sell you and each member of your family and loved ones a special anti-apocalypse hat for a knock down price of only £25 each. These hats are guaranteed to protect you and anyone wearing one from the apocalypse until June 2013 giving plenty of time for normal civilisation to be resumed. Should anyone wearing one of my hats die due to the events of the pole shift/comet impact/numerous days of night or any other events of an extra terrestrial cause, there would be a full refund on production of a death certificate. If of course you can find any one of the peddlers of the “end of the world shit” books who offer a money back guarantee if the world doesn’t end on their date of choice I’ll quite happily eat all my ‘special hats’ on the day when people are refunded.