Posts tagged: astronomy
Merry Christmas
And Remember…
Tour the known universe in 6 minutes
The AMNH has put together this amazing tour of the entire known universe based on the most up-to-date astronomical data. Every object is in its correct location, with proper scale and movement.
Here’s the full article to go with it.
Via: Pharyngula
Super powers: XKCD style
They laugh now, but within 10 years the city’s entire criminal class will have quit to work on space research.
I didn’t post anything for Carl Sagan Day or his birthday. I’ve been a little busy lately with a couple of projects. XKCD does a great job as usual. It makes me wonder how many would-have-been criminals are actually working on space research because of Carl Sagan’s amazing influence.
When Galaxies Collide
Felicia Day *swoon* (and Sean Astin) try to educate the public about colliding galaxies in this hilarious NASA PSA for the Spitzer Space Telescope.
There are a lot of great little inside jokes in there. “What in the name of Joss Whedon?” And Felicia makes a wonderful point:
It just goes to show you don’t have to make up explosions or doomsday scenarios to make science interesting. Astronomy is pretty interesting on its own.
Via: The Bad Astronomer
We Are All Connected
Symphony of Science has done it again. This time with appearances by Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye.
Check out their previous video, grab MP3 and FLAC files of the songs as well as video downloads at their website.
Congratulations Space X!
A little bit of history was made Sunday evening at 23:16 GMT when Space X’s two-stage Falcon 1 rocket successfully made it into Earth orbit.
After three failed attempts, Space X has become the first privately owned company to send a rocket into orbit. A warm congratulations go out to everyone involved. I can’t imagine how excited they all must feel, but the cheers in the background of the video above give you some idea.
Awesome and utterly awe-inspiring! Keep an eye out around the 3:00 marker (after stage 1 separation) when the edge of Earth appears in the upper-left corner of the screen. I’m almost at a loss for words. This is just amazing.
Seriously… congratulations to everyone at Space X! You’re all heroes in my book.
The Moon Transits The Earth
EPOXI, the repurposed and renamed Deep Impact spacecraft, turned back towards Earth last May and captured images of the Moon passing by. Don Lindler put together an animation (below) of the entire transit.
Wow… Just, wow.
Via: Bad Astronomy
The IYA Is Coming
Free Astronomy Lectures Online
The Astronomy Society of the Pacific has made many of the talks from their annual Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures available for free on their website in the form of The Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures Podcasts. There are lectures from the likes of David Grinspoon, Alex Filippenko, and Frank Drake.
There are videos of some of the lectures available for you iTunes users. Not sure why you need iTunes to watch free videos. Embrace the torrent.
Via: Bad Astronomy
Death By Particles?
Most likely not… however, Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, reports
Two men are suing to stop the LHC from being switched on, saying it may be dangerous and might even destroy the Earth
As Phil states in more detail than I care to take here, there are two threatening possibilities regarding the work to be done by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). One, it creates a black hole that.. well you know what black holes do. And two, it generates what’s called a quantum strangelet, a little quantum doo-dad that does nothing but convert normal matter into more strangelets. The fear is that they’ll start up a massive chain reaction of matter-to-strangelet conversions, eventually converting the entire universe.
First, relax. The chances of a black hole are minimal due to Hawking radiation effect, that says they would just evaporate instantly. And as far as the strangelets, a study a few years ago by physicists at MIT, Yale, and Princeton points out that..
… higher energy particles hit the Moon all the time. If strangelets could be created in this way, the Moon would have converted to a big ball o’ strangelets billions of years ago.
So, no worries. But if you want a little more info, check out Phil’s evaluation of the situation.
Via: Bad Astronomy.
