In 1900 a sponge diver called Elias Stadiatos discovered the wreck of an ancient merchant ship off
the tiny island of Antikythera near Crete. The
corbita, dating from the first century B.C., was heavily laden with treasure of all kinds, original bronze life-size statues, marble reproductions of older works, jewelry, wine, fine furniture and one immensely complicated scientific instrument.
The
Antikythera mechanism was originally housed in a wooden box about the size of a shoebox with dials on the outside and a complex clockwork assembly of gears inscribed and configured to produce
solar and lunar positions in synchronization with the calendar year. By rotating a handle on its side, its owner could read on its front and back dials the progressions of the lunar and synodic months over four-year cycles. The device has been estimated to be accurate to
1 part in 40,000. (more inside...)
posted by lagado
on Sep 24, 2002 -
15 comments
New career option! Be slave worker on the Martian surface! This is pretty cool, actually. It's an internet based pilot study run by NASA to identify and classify all of the craters on the surface of Mars. This is a big job. All you need is a IE 5 or Netscape 6 web browser. Since its inception on November 17, web users combined have contributed 111,938 crater-markings and 26,877 crater-classification.
posted by lagado
on Jan 9, 2001 -
2 comments
The World at Night. This amazing
image (warning 500K) is actually a composite of hundreds of pictures made by the orbiting DMSP satellites over regions of the world at night. You can clearly see the Nile river, Hong Kong, Hawaii and probably, if you look close enough, the town you are in right now. From
Astronomy Picture of the Day
posted by lagado
on Nov 27, 2000 -
18 comments
