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 [...]
Behold the Kepler Collection
Kepler‘s planets, seen in silhouette, against their parent stars. The star colors — which are accurate — indicate temperature: the redder, the cooler; the bluer, the hotter. These are not images taken by Kepler, but are generated from Kepler data; measurements of the stars’ temperatures and distances help astronomers determine their luminosities, and once these [...]
Art Sunday: The spectacular Mandelbrot Set
The Mandelbrot Set, named after one Benoit Mandelbrot, who spent years studying and popularizing it. We at psnt.net are grateful for Wolfgang Beyer, who created these beautiful images and freely released them for the world to enjoy. Source of all images: Wikimedia Commons It’s Art Sunday again! This week we bring to you the Mandelbrot [...]
Happy Pi Day!
Pi (π) to 5,060 digits. Image source: The psnt.net Digital Graphics Squad (DGS) Dear Alert Readers, it has arrived: 3/14, Pi Day! So there they are, right up there, the first 5,060 digits of pi. That’s a lot of digits, sure, but you can see 10,000 here, 100,000 here or 1,000,000 here. If you’re really [...]
The Kepler Orrery
Orrery (n.): planetarium consisting of an apparatus that illustrates the relative positions and motions of bodies in the solar system by rotation and revolution of balls moved by wheelwork. Definition lifted from Princeton’s WordNet; see an example of a traditional mechanical solar system orrery here. The Kepler Orrery. The incredible dancing exoplanets. The numbers that [...]
Back to Top | Comments Off
Awake, my Sol
Sol in action. Captured in the ultraviolet by SDO, this movie shows an erupting solar prominence and covers about 90 minutes (24 seconds per frame). This may make one think the prominence moves pretty slowly, but scale is important here: Placed side-to-side, about 20 Earths could fit across the frame. So this curtain of ionized [...]
