Winter solstice + lunar eclipse = coolness
Tonight’s eclipse in more detail than you probably wanted. The central part of the Earth’s shadow is called the umbra and is indicated by the central red circle in the image above. Between 2:41 and 3:53 A.M. the Moon will be fully within the umbra for observers on the East Coast. For observers to the [...]
The universe on a slider
Stuff on the millimeter scale. From The Scale of the Universe by Cary and Michael Huang This is for those of you who, like us at psnt.net, enjoy meditatating on the Big Picture. Alert Reader Matt Rich sent me this link today. Just click on the image above and have a great time. Make no [...]
Operation midweek entertainment: the Möbius strip and you
It’s not an optical illusion, but it looks like one: the Möbius strip. Image created by Peter Gosling and featured among a host of fun optical illusions at Uniview Worldwide. The German mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius was born on this day in 1790. So happy 220th, August! BEFORE YOU READ THIS POST, go scare up [...]
It’s a bottomless sky
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Source: S. Beckwith & the HUDF Working Group/HST/ESA/NASA. Click on the image for a nice high-resolution 19 MB version. It may take a minute to load, but once you have it you can have a boatload of fun getting lost among the jillions of distant and colorful galaxies. Of course, [...]
Put this in your pipe and smoke it
Speaking of being lost in the cosmos, here’s something for you to bear in mind. This is a video called The Known Universe. It is a beautiful thing. It is in some ways like the cosmic portion of Charles Eames‘s famous Powers of Ten, but the big difference is that in this case all the [...]
