Operation Weekend Entertainment: Contact‘s opening sequence and other universal tours
Last Sunday I did a kind of “Welcome to the Universe” presentation for the Sunday school class I’m teaching. It was a lot of fun. It made me think of all the efforts people have made throughout the years to show graphically how our planet and solar system and galaxy fit into the Real Big [...]
Back to Top | Comments Off
Art Sunday: NGC 474 and the coming galactic set-to
NGC 474. Credit: P.-A. Duc (CEA, CFHT), Atlas 3D Collaboration. Image source: Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). All the individual points of light are stars within our own Milky Way galaxy and are in the extreme foreground. The two galaxies are 10,000 times further away than the stars. There are some other galaxies in [...]
Farewell to an era
STS-135 lands during the predawn hour yesterday morning at Kennedy Space Center. Despite the problems with the shuttle program, its demise makes me a bit wistful. Image source: NASA Well, that’s it for the Space Shuttle. The first one launched in 1981, when I was 13. Now I’m 43, and no one can say where [...]
On upper-class medieval persons, Bronze-Age goat herders, and semi-enlightened Englishmen, featuring full-color illustrative proof of the Bronze-Age Goat Herder Conceit
Almost enlightened, but not quite: Sir Frederick William Herschel, artist unknown. Image source: Wikimedia Commons “Imagine we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would even embarrass a child, but he would [...]
Meet the new conspiracy
The phases of Venus as photographed in 2002 by Chris Proctor at the Torquay Boys’ Grammar School Observartory in Devon, England. It was Galileo’s observations of Venus’s phases that most powerfully argued against the ancient geocentric system of the Greek astronomer Ptolemy. Galileo’s observations did not convince anyone of the truth of the Copernican system, [...]
TBSP, Reznor style
Cassini Mission from Chris Abbas on Vimeo. Make sure to full-screen it and set it on HD. Read more about it here This is really a wonderful, hypnotizing look at Saturn (tbsp) and its flying circus of rings and moons. It really capitalizes on the beautiful (dare I say haunting) grayscale images that are a [...]
Back to Top | Comments Off
Introducing 114 and 116. Watch those shifty scientists
Back a few years ago Cobb County, a major suburban county in metro Atlanta (my hometown and current address), posted stickers in high school biology books that read, “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open [...]
