While this is a nice little astronomy video, it isn’t really about the stars at all. When you go to the 100,000 Stars web site the really interesting thing is the demonstration of WebGL. Currently WebGL is implemented by default in the latest release of Chrome, and it is available in Safari, Firefox, and Opera, but you have to turn it on to use it (get activation instructions). I am sure no one is going to be shocked or surprised that WebGL also requires a fairly robust and recent graphics card, and even with that you may need to grab the latest drivers for it. While this should work on most tablets, smart phone implementation is still problematic.
Neil Armstrong was one of my heroes, and I finally found a video I wanted to post here about his contributions to the space program. This Week @ NASA (actually, last week at this point) had this brief comment about him, along with a number of other interesting entries on a variety of topics. If you are not familiar with the weekly vlog, here is an entry to give you an idea of what they cover. You can subscribe to the podcast at the link above if you want to follow it…
Not the whole sun, just one little strand of plasma. But that one little strand was many times larger than Earth, and was traveling at 900 miles per second when it left the sun on August 31st this year. NASA had a number of observation platforms able to get a look at it, so they put together this rather amazing video. The music is quite tasty as well, wish I knew what it was. The music is not as good on the second video, but it is quite silly and celebrates the recent landing of Curiosity on the red planet, so I felt the need to include it.
The Mars Descent Imager camera, MARDI for short, took a bunch of 1600X1200 pixel resolution pictures during the decent and landing. As usual with things that happen so far away, the bandwidth of the uplink back to Earth was the choke point on our retrieving the sequence, but now we have it. The original capture rate was 5 images per second, but this playback is at 15 frames/second, so it takes noticeably less than the original 7 minutes of terror (watch second video for that one) to play the video back. Use the link to watch the video on YouTube if you want to see it in full 1080P resolution. Thanks to Peta Pixel for the heads up on this one.
Written and sung by The Phenomenauts, this is a near-punk anthem to a world class astrophysicist, Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson. Someone had to inherit the mantle from Carl Sagan, and it turned out to be Neil. Thanks to Laughing Squid for the heads up on this one.
The Annular Eclipse that happened earlier this week was amazing, but those of us who saw it from North America only got a little tease of the event. If you got to see if from Japan, like Danny Choo, then perhaps you got to see it in its full glory. Here is a picture or two to put it in perspective for you. The first image is Danny in his Filter Facemask, which will hopefully protect him from having his retinas burned out by staring into the sun. To me, the scary bit is he reminds me of Friend from the movie trilogy 20th Century Boys, a wonderful Sci-Fi sequence based on the Manga. The second image is what he was staring at. If you missed it, don’t worry. You can either travel to the next event half way around the world in 50 years, or stay where you are and wait for it to happen there again, in 300 years.
