Oh look, another nebula picture from the European Southern Observatory. Again? Yes. I make no apologies, people. This little beauty is NGC 3324, a stellar nursery some 7,500 light years away in the southern constellation Carina. This pretty picture comprises light through visual, oxygen-III and hydrogen-alpha filters captured by the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at La Silla. Nancy Atkinson thinks it looks like Alfred Hitchcock. Image credit: ESO.

Other pretty space pictures I spotted this week: barred spiral galaxy NGC 1073, courtesy of the Hubble; and, closer to home, Saturn’s moon Dione in front of an edge-on look at the rings, courtesy of Cassini.

A couple of science fiction and fantasy writing workshops to tell you about: one in Ottawa, the other in Montreal. The one in Ottawa takes place on February 26 on the University of Ottawa campus. It’s a day-long affair led by local authors Derek Künsken, Matt Moore and Hayden Trenholm. It costs $40, with proceeds going toward Can-Con, the local SF convention. Here are the details. I’m going to this one. The one in Montreal, which I can’t attend, takes place on Tuesday evenings from April 3 to May 22. Called Sense of Wonder: Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction Stories, it’s led by Claude Lalumière. It costs $175 (less if you’re a Quebec Writers’ Federation member).

More roundups of the best science fiction and fantasy of 2011 (see previous entry); now we’ve moved past the “what will end up in the year’s best anthologies” phase and entered the “what will people nominate for awards” phase. Author Rachel Swirsky offers her recommendations for the short story, novelette and novella categories, with more presumably to come. Also, the Locus recommended reading list came out yesterday.

The Royal Ontario Museum has announced a new exhibition, Ultimate Dinosaurs: Giants from Gondwana, that I think I’m going to have to make time to see:

Surrounded by life-like environmental murals, the exhibition features real fossils, skeletons and 17 full-scale skeletal casts, many of which have never been seen before in Canada. ROM visitors will experience the world’s first display of Futalognkosaurus, a giant long-necked sauropod, one of the biggest animals to have ever walked the earth stretching 110 ft. long and weighing as much as 10 elephants. Also on display are Giganotosaurus, possibly the largest land predator to have ever lived, as well as the crocodile-faced spinosaur Suchomimus, and horned meat-eater Carnotaurus, and many more.

It’ll run from June 23, 2012 to January 6, 2013; I should be able to manage a visit to Toronto during that time. (Should I mention that the Canadian Museum of Nature has a Carnotaurus? They do.)

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is an astonishing and moving animated short film. It’s been nominated for an Oscar; I’m going to nominate it for a Hugo. You can watch it online at Vimeo (see above); it’s also available for sale on iTunes and as an iPad app.

Books on introversion seem to be everywhere of late, all of which seem to be premised on surviving as an introvert in a culture that values extrovert traits. (Introverts, it must be said, tend to read more than extroverts.) The latest to come across my radar seems interesting: Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (website, Amazon: hardcover, Kindle). From the interviews that the author has been giving (“Oh, the irony of being an introvert on book tour!”) it seems that one of her central arguments is that Western (or at least North American) society’s extroversion bias is relatively recent, and that, in a world where group work and meetings are valued over working quietly and without interruption, introvert values are chronically underrated. From her interview in Scientific American:

In our society, the ideal self is bold, gregarious, and comfortable in the spotlight. We like to think that we value individuality, but mostly we admire the type of individual who’s comfortable “putting himself out there.” Our schools, workplaces, and religious institutions are designed for extroverts. Introverts are to extroverts what American women were to men in the 1950s — second-class citizens with gigantic amounts of untapped talent.

This is a far cry from books that seem to take as given the need for introverts to pretend to be extroverts. Via Andrew Sullivan.

(Some of you may have seen the author’s piece, “The Rise of the New Groupthink,” in the New York Times earlier this month. And if you haven’t yet read the ur-text of introvert awareness, Jonathan Rausch’s “Caring for Your Introvert” from the March 2003 issue of The Atlantic, you should.)

From the Earth to the Moon (De la Terre à la Lune) is one of Verne’s most immediately recognizable novels, the first part of a duology in which a typical trio of Vernean adventurers ride a bullet fired from Florida around the Moon. First published in 1865, From the Earth to the Moon ends rather abruptly, right after the successful launch of the projectile; for what happens to our adventurers, readers had to wait until 1870, when the sequel, Around the Moon (Autour de la Lune), was published. In this post I will only deal with the first book.

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If, like me, you often wonder how far out radio signals can be detected before they’re drowned out by cosmic background radiation — for example, you’re working on a science fiction story that depends on being able to detect such signals from other stars — then, like me, you’ll be interested in this Ask MetaFilter thread and the SETI range calculator. Short version: broadcast radio signals fade out pretty fast thanks to the inverse square law, so it’s pretty unlikely that space aliens will be along to demand explanations for our 1950s television programs.

Infrared astronomy is the bomb. Here’s an infrared look at the Helix Nebula, a planetary nebula some 700 light-years away — which is to say, not all that far as these things go — in the constellation Aquarius. This was taken by the VISTA telescope at the ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. Compare with how it looks in visible light: infrared brings out all kinds of interesting structure. Image credit: ESO/VISTA/J. Emerson; acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit.

I have not forgotten my Maps in Science Fiction and Fantasy project, though it’s lain fallow for a bit while I juggled other things. Here are a few short stories about maps that I’ve encountered over the past few months.

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