Croatian software developer and amateur image processor
Gordan Ugarković takes images from NASA's unmanned space probes released to the
Planetary Data System, splices them together and tweaks the colors, sometimes combining higher resolution black and white images with color images, sometimes recreating what the object would look like in natural color (ie, in visible wavelengths, from images taken in multiple wavelengths), sometimes heightening the contrast to bring out detail. (
via)
[more inside]
posted by nangar
on May 20, 2011 -
7 comments
Tour the solar system from a browser window. "Eyes on the Solar System", currently in beta, from JPL and Caltech.
Yes, you have to allow a 3rd party plugin. Sorry about that.
Zoom in to earth, and the sunrise line is accurate for the current time. Zoom to asteroids, satellites, or planets. Rewind time to watch Voyager go home.
posted by lothar
on Mar 16, 2011 -
19 comments
Flash Friday Fun! Excellent, physics-based game wherein you control the sun, trying to grab planets and keep them in orbit. Any game that includes the admonition not to "go hyperbola" is OK by me.
posted by MrMoonPie
on Aug 15, 2008 -
42 comments
Did the roof of the Pantheon influence Copernicus? Are the planets of the solar system aligned in accordance with a nearly-forgotten hypothesis known (unfairly) as
Bode's Law? A fascinating wide-ranging discussion on BLDGBLOG with
Walter Murch, the visionary editor and sound designer for such films as
The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient, THX1138, and many others. [Murch's film work has previously been discussed
here and
here.]
posted by digaman
on Apr 7, 2007 -
20 comments
My very elegant mother just sat upon ninjas ... the textbooks, mnemonic devices and more will have to be changed today. Pluto has been demoted from its status as planet to a
dwarf planet. We now have 8 in our solar system. The debate is
not at all new, and its apparent resolution may not matter to our everyday lives, but it's just a little weird to think of all of the things that will have to be retroactively edited or amended as a result.
posted by twiggy
on Aug 24, 2006 -
96 comments
Explore our local chunk of space.
Here is a scale view of the Solar System, and
here one can take a quick trip around it. Use the
guidebook to plan your trip (but beware the pop-up ads). Don't forget to bring a
camera and snap some
photos.
posted by dazed_one
on Nov 12, 2005 -
12 comments
Cartography is a skill pretty much taken for granted now, but it
wasn't always
so. Accurate maps were once prized state secrets, laborious efforts that cost a fortune and took years (or even decades) to complete.
How things have changed. (Yours now,
$110) It took almost 500 years to map North America, but it's only taken one tenth of that to map just everything else. In the last 50 years, we've been able to create acurate atlases of
two planets and
one moon (with a
second in the works). Actually,
we've done a lot more than that. We're actually running out of things to map.
Maybe Not.
posted by absalom
on Jan 27, 2005 -
17 comments
Saturn's enigmatic moon
Titan holds on to its mysteries.
Radar images reveal quite a bit of variation but no clear interpretation. The hazy atmosphere prevents the sudden shock of discovery that characterized the Voyager and Galileo flybys of the moons of Jupiter, revealing little more than
fuzzy Rorschach blobs. With less than 1% of the surface mapped, researchers suspect that Titan has a
young surface shaped by processes that have yet to be revealed.
posted by KirkJobSluder
on Nov 5, 2004 -
5 comments
Celestia is the most beautiful toy. It's a free (open source) simulator of the universe, including breathtaking models of known planets. Watch Jupiter rise over Io or follow the course of a solar eclipse. [more inside]
posted by grahamwell
on Feb 4, 2003 -
21 comments
Solar System Akin to Earth's Is Discovered Any minute now, I imagine somebody at a listening station on a smaller, bluer planet a few in from this one making a minute adjustment to their equipment and promptly spraying warm stimulant-laced beverage over their console...
posted by hob
on Jun 14, 2002 -
13 comments
The Solar System Simulator 'is
designed to simulate - as realistically as possible - what one would actually see from any point in the Solar System. The software looks up the positions of the Sun, planets and satellites from ephemeris files developed here at JPL, as well as star positions and colors from a variety of stellar databasees, and uses special-purpose renderers to draw a color scene. Texture maps for each of the planets and physical models for planetary rings have been derived (in most cases) from scientific data collected by various JPL spacecraft.' Far too complicated for me to even begin to understand, still I've always wondered what Saturn
looks like from Triton.
posted by RobertLoch
on Mar 27, 2002 -
15 comments
Reflections on a Mote of Dust "We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam."
Carl Sagan "Pale Blue Dot"
posted by crasspastor
on Sep 11, 2001 -
15 comments
