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24 January 2009
Pancam spinoff enables 1,474 Megapixel Inauguration Photo
Remember how I posted about the cool commercial PanCam spinoff that can take giant panoramas? Well apparently photographer David Bergman used it to take a monstrous 1,474 megapixel image of the inauguration! The level of detail is amazing. Go take a look and remember that the space program helped make this image possible.
12 January 2009
Colonizing Earth
The other day I helped a race of hideous spiderlike aliens colonize Antarctica. I’ve posted about the game Spore before, but the basic idea is that you begin as a protozoan in the primordial ooze and work your way up through various stages of evolution until you become a space-faring civilization capable of colonizing other worlds, terraforming them, and populating them with plants and animals of your choosing (or even …
14 December 2008
Facebook Blogs
Hello readers! I just logged in to Facebook and discovered that they have a new “blogs” feature that allows people to rank blogs and join blog networks so you can see who else likes to read what you do. If you have a facebook account (and anyone can get one if you don’t) then I’d love to “meet” you! Also, you can vouch for me as actually being the author …
7 December 2008
The Year-in-Review Meme
The rule: post the first sentence of the first post for each month. (I cheated a little…) February: The mantra of Mars exploration is “follow the water,” and my research is no exception. March: Check. This. Out. The HiRISE camera caught avalanches in action near the north pole of Mars. April: Big news! Google has teamed up with Virgin to form Project Virgle: the first human colony on Mars. May: …
21 November 2008
Holst's 'The Planets'
A month or so ago, Cornell hosted a planetary science conference, and one of the big events associated with that was a performance of Holst’s famous symphony “The Planets”. For each movement, some of us in the astronomy department put together a slideshow to go with the music. The concert was totally awesome, and there is now a video and audio version available online! For me, firefox crashed when I …
14 November 2008
Lidless and Wreathed in Flame
I just had an outrageously geeky moment, and needed to share. I think there is something that the Hubble team isn’t telling us about their latest planet-discovery image… Masked image of Fomalhaut and its planet Fomalhaut-b. The Eye of Sauron.
3 November 2008
Vote Adama in '08
Can’t decide who to vote for? (hint: Obama) Courtesy of io9, here are some sci-fi alternatives to the current candidates. Adama ’08!
29 October 2008
NaNoWriMo
“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.” – Leonard Bernstein Starting on Saturday, I will be participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), an annual activity in which insane writers attempt to complete a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. The rules are that you can plan as much (or as little) as you want beforehand, but the page must …
7 October 2008
More Astro-Art!
Lynn Adrich, Pilgrimage: Through the Wormhole 2008 installation in progress Right on the heels of my post about Planets as Art, a press release from JPL is announcing a new exhibit in Pasadena that is the result of collaboration between the Spitzer space telescope team and the Pasadena Art Center College of Design. From the press release: For thousands of years, people have used art to explore ideas that humble, …
Red Mars on TV!
If you are reading this blog, which you are, and you have not read Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, you should drop everything and go get the book. I read it in high school, before I really knew much about Mars but when I was starting to think about planetary astronomy. It is the story of the first colonists to permanently setlle the red planet, and is more realistic …
