Good astronomy – Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy moves to Slate.

For those of us who take a rational and sceptical view of matters the news that Phil Plait’s excellent Bad Astronomy blog is moving to Slate.com is very welcome.

Well worth checking out if you are interested in astronomy, space science and debunking… well… here’s what he has to say about it himself…

Over the years, anyone who loves science will let you know how badly it gets spun, folded, and mutilated. Sometimes it’s the press, sometimes the public, or movies, or politicians—actually, a lot of the time it’s politicians—but there are a lot of misconceptions about science in people’s minds. I started writing about this way back in the early Dawn of the Internet and haven’t been able to stop. 

But it’s not just myths about science that are so aggravating; out-and-out attacks on science are rampant. The main venues of this are politics and religion, and usually some combination of the two. I will not hesitate to call such attacks out when I see them. If you think the Earth is 6,000 years old, if you think global warming is a hoax, if you think vaccines cause autism, then my goal in life is to show you what science and reality have to say about that.

Plait has a book of the same name and it’s a great read and fits in with a body of work that includes Carl Sagan and others. And as someone noted in comments on Slate, just in time to deal with the 2012 apocalypse stuff that is infesting much of the internet. Not a moment too soon.