C'mon Man!

ESPN football coverage has a bit they call "C'mon Man!", where they explain their disgust or exasperation at stupid plays or calls in NFL games of the week.

I think we need to start one for astronomy journalism here.

My first entry was about a supernova in Puppis poorly reported in the press.

Well, here is the second, in what I hope will be a short list, of stupid science mistakes reported by NASA or other professional sources, blindly repeated by the press. Recently posted, and reproduced all over the web was this comment on a Hubble multi-broad-band image of the great globular cluster, M13 in Hercules.

"Like a whirl of shiny flakes sparkling in a snow globe, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope catches an instantaneous glimpse of many hundreds of thousands of stars moving about in the globular cluster M13, one of the brightest and best-known globular clusters in the northern sky. This glittering metropolis of stars is easily found in the winter sky in the constellation Hercules."

These space telescope people have got to get it together. Hercules is not easily visible in the winter sky. Any amateur astronomer who has observed ANY Messier objects can tell you winter is about the only time you can't see this globular cluster!

C'mon Man!