The scale of things

[norton ash]

Must be nice, just right of Orion. Mid-America is sweaty. Much love, play me a little Debussy as I close the curtains and turn on the fan.

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^ For you, norton ash.


^ François-Joël Thiollier plays it. One of the best performances online. For you.

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Highlights mine.

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Look Up, Smile, and Wave… at Saturn | Phil Plait
Bad Astronomy | Wednesday, July 17, 2013, at 11:00 AM


^ From 2006, Earth peeks out from behind Saturn in a Cassini mosaic. Click to encronosenate. Photo by NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Sometimes, when the abyss stares into you, you can stare back. And you can smile and wave.

On Friday, July 19, between 21:27 and 21:42 UTC, the Cassini spacecraft will be taking pictures of Saturn, the magnificent ringed jewel of our solar system. Unlike most of the tens of thousands of images of Saturn taken, though, these will be special: From over a billion kilometers away, Earth will be shining in them as well.

When this mosaic of images is completed, it will show Saturn and its rings, backlit by the Sun, with the Earth peeking over its edge. That final image will therefore in principle contain every human in existence. That means you. And me. And everyone you know, don’t know, love, are miffed at, are inspired by, in awe of, and who are taller, shorter, sicker, healthier, happier, sadder, slower, faster, the same, and different than you.

In short, human.

To celebrate this planetary family portrait, two events are planned.

One, The Day The Earth Smiled, is organized by Cassini Imaging Team Leader Carolyn Porco. You don’t have to smile: you can dance, tip your head, make a toast, or do whatever you think fit to acknowledge what we humans have done to explore our Universe. She’s also holding a pair of contests to encourage participation.

The first is to take a picture on July 19th of Earth, bearing in mind this question:

If you found yourself somehow communicating with an alien being from another world orbiting a star in a distant quadrant of the galaxy, and you could take only one picture of your home planet that best conveys to her/him/it the uniqueness of Earth among the planets orbiting the Sun, what would that picture look like?

For me, I would use this picture to show these aliens that we explore, we learn, and we concern ourselves about our home. But that’s me (and, to be fair, I didn't take that picture). What picture would you take? Think it through, go and take it, and submit it!

The other contest is to create a piece of music that, as Porco puts it, “…must exalt the listener and capture the spirit and significance of The Day The Earth Smiled... a day of cosmic self-awareness, celebrated planet-wide, marked by an interplanetary salute between robot and maker.”

The rules for the contests are on Porco’s Diamond Sky Productions website. You can tweet about the event (or follow it on Twitter) with the hashtag #DayTheEarthSmiled. The wonderful group Astronomers Without Borders is supporting the effort as well, with lots of nifty ideas for you to participate in.


^ Saturn, its rings, and their shadow on the planet’s cloudtops. This was taken by Cassini on July 13, 2013. Tip o’ the lens cap to Titan Saturn’s Moon on Facebook. Photo by NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The other event is being held by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and is called Wave at Saturn. This one is simple: at the time the Cassini pictures are taken, go outside and wave at Saturn. You can take a picture of yourself at that moment and upload it to their Flickr group. They’ve set up a Facebook page, and you can tweet your efforts with the hashtag #waveatsaturn.

Remember, the pictures will start being taken at 21:27 UTC on July 19—that time has been calculated to include the time it takes light to get from Earth to Saturn. So if you go out then, for the next 15 minutes the light from Earth will be on its way to Saturn, to be captured by Cassini’s cameras.

At the appointed time, I will be in San Diego, at Comic Con. But I think I can spare a few minutes to go outside, soak up the afternoon Sun for a moment, and then turn to the east a bit. I’ve seen it countless times through images, through data, through my telescope, and through my own eyes, and let me say: There’s always a smile on my face ready for Saturn.

[justdrew]

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This vimeo is spectacular, clever and a very entertaining work of art for science and music enthusiasts!


^ Around Saturn | Good voyage, Daisy.
Image editor, Fabio Di Donato, Rome, Italy

More detail about the video at Universe Today, Jason Major.

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The editor, Fabio Di Donato, synchronized many of the images to down beats and off-beats in the vid’s music, Waltz 2 in C minor & E-flat major. Waltz 2 is one of eight movements in the entire work titled Suite for Variety Orchestra (post-1956) composed by Dmitri Shostakovich.

Suite for Variety Orchestra was for years misidentified as Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 2 (1938), which is a work in three movements.

I could be wrong, but as far as I can tell after looking at three wiki lists of orchestras, the music in the video isn’t performed by Armonie Symphony Orchestra: apparently, that’s the name of an iTunes site that collects and sells classical music .

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The Haunting Melody of Global Warming | Phil Plait
Bad Astronomy | Thursday, July 18, 2013, at 8:00 AM


^ The rising chords of global warming. Photo from the video

It’s not easy to understand all the subtleties of climate change. We experience weather on a daily basis and have memories of longer-term patterns—it was a rainy spring last year, or there was a brutally cold winter a few years back. But over longer periods of time, it’s difficult to truly see what’s happening with our changing climate, especially because the change is slow compared to human experience.

And have no doubt, over time the global temperatures are warming. Our own daily experience fails us, and looking at a graph leaves a lot of people cold (so to speak). However, sometimes converting a simple graph into some different form of information can deliver the message far better, and more effectively, than dots on a page.

University of Minnesota undergrad Daniel Crawford did something very clever: He took surface air temperature data and converted them into musical notes, one for each year from 1880 to 2012, and played them on his cello. The result is, in a word, haunting:



Amazing, and eerie. Because the piece is short, it’s easy to hear how the average note gets higher and higher with time. In this music, because of the way it’s played and the notes themselves, it’s easy to associate the overall rising pitch to feelings of tension, fear, and escalation.

The odd intervals (difference between pitches) from note to note in the piece are also unsettling. The aspect that drills into me the most distressingly is how the final few notes are at a pitch that is disturbingly and clearly higher than the rest of the notes in the piece. That’s because the past few years have been the hottest on average since measurements have started being taken.

That’s why they call it global warming.

I think this is an effective tool to show people that our planet is changing, warming. This has ramifications, and they aren’t good. Loss of Arctic ice, animal and plant extinctions, increased number of and devastation by wildfires, and more. It’s way past time we take these issues seriously. Steps are being taken by the White House, but I hope these are just the very first tiny steps compared to what’s to come. We need to make sure to hold our governments accountable and make sure they take action. I hope this video helps get that message across.

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The way the undergrad, Daniel Crawford, chose to play the sonification was an articulation defined as mezzo-staccato or portato—and I’m guessing at those articulations since I’m not a string player—yet, in my opinion, portato makes musical sense given the context of a continually threatening rise in global warming.



Performing an entire, short piece, expressed portato and played strictly to the quadruple meter, isn’t actually very pretty, and the idea of global warming isn’t pretty either; but neither are the monotonous, looped chord progressions in the background music prior to and after the sonified solo, nor the practice or performance room setting, in which the player sits center stage, alone with no one engaging him in front of the camera, and a paneled wooden wall behind him. All of that is stark, I’d say! Perhaps, that’s what he and the team wanted the setting to be. I really wouldn’t know.

In contrast, if the piece had been performed purely legato, the piece might then lend a feeling of a song, an eerie one, to some listeners.

I presume Mr. Crawford had studied appropriate approaches for the instrument of choice, and, in my way of listening, an acknowledgement of the way the piece was capably interpreted made the difference—it’s not just data sonified to notes for the score, from my point of view, anyway.

However, there seems to be a discrepancy. The pdf music score shows 136 notes, and we’re told each pitch represents one year of averaged surface temperatures. We also read in the summary page of origin at ensia dot com that respective pitches, represented by a span of 132 years from 1880 through 2012, had been subsequently scored (as notes) for performance on the cello.

A surmise for consideration would be that during a data (or musical) sonification, the sonifier sometimes necessarily adjusts the music score, therefore authentically reflecting—or not—the data for discerning and interested listeners and scientists, as examples. I guess some data noted 2013 in NASA’s data sheet might’ve been included in the final?

I’ve yet to attempt a sonification, and my cautious, non-musical speculations with regard to sonifications have been a result of brave imaginings .

~ A.

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^ Wind at O Espaço do Tempo | Damian Stewart

VIMEO NOTES. Wind is an outdoor digital installation, and an experiment in real-time cross-perceptual visual sonification.

It sonifies an incoming video stream of moving grass or leaves to create a real-time soundtrack that augments and draws your attention to the visual motion itself. Put some loudspeakers in the field of grass or in the trees your camera is pointing at, and the installation is complete.

Made with openFrameworks and Pure Data.

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The Firefox Nebula | Phil Plait
Bad Astronomy | Thursday, July 18, 2013, at 11:15 AM

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere and go outside around midnight in the summer, you’ll see a big W made of five brightish stars in the northeast. That’s Cassiopeia, the constellation of the queen. Due to geometric circumstance, we are looking into the plane of our galaxy when we peer in that direction. That means we’re looking into a region of space that has more stars, more gas, and more dust than average.

Which means it’s a good place to look for interesting objects. And in fact it’s where you will find the gorgeous nebula Sharpless 2-188, the gas cast off by a dying star:


^ A star screaming through space blows a vast wind of gas. Click to pyrovulpeculenate. Photo by T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage) and H. Schweiker (WIYN and NOAO/AURA/NSF)

This image was taken by my friend Travis Rector (and Heidi Schweiker) using the Kitt Peak 4-meter telescope. They used two filters; one shows hydrogen gas (orange) and the other oxygen (cyan). I highly suggest you grab the 4,900-by-3,800 pixel version, or at least the 1,200-by-940 pixel image, because wow.

Sh2-188 is what we call a planetary nebula, a bit of a misnomer since the first that were discovered looked small, disk-shaped, and slightly greenish through a telescope. Now we know they’re formed by the winds from dying stars, vast gales of gas expelled as the star sheds its outer layers and exposes its small, hot core. The leftover star, called a white dwarf, is so hot it blasts out ultraviolet light, enough to cause the gas to glow.

Planetaries come in fantastic shapes, mostly due to the way the wind from the star changes over time and interacts with previously blown-out material. But Sh2-188 is different, even by the standards of the planetary nebula menagerie. It’s highly asymmetric. Even though you can see it makes a complete circle (well, oval), one side is far brighter and more interesting-looking than the other.

This is almost certainly due to the culprit star itself, screaming through space at high speed. It’s not 100 percent clear which star is at the heart of this nebula, mostly because there are so many to choose from! But there is a faint star down to the lower left of the inside of the cloud, faint and not at all distinguishable by eye from any of the others, that is most likely the actual “central” star. It’s blue—expected for the hot, dense, cinder needed to light up this gas—and about the right brightness.

Also as expected, measurements over time indicate the star is moving through space toward the lower left, probably at well over 100 kilometers (60 miles) per second. That would explain much of why this nebula is so asymmetric; as the star (and its wind) rams through the gas in space, the stuff in the direction of travel piles up, just like a snowplow pushing through snow. It’s also possible that there’s just more stuff in between the stars in that direction, so there is more material to pile up. But either way, the speed of the star is the major reason this planetary is so unusual.

I found this picture browsing through Travis’ gallery, and even before I read his description I thought to myself, “Huh. That looks familiar!” and sure enough, Travis had the same thought and mentioned it in the caption.

Does it look like the logo for any browser you might be using?



Once you see it, the resemblance is pretty good. I can see ears, a nose, the tail, even the foreleg! And while it may not actually be on fire, the surface temperature of the stars is far hotter than the Sun. Of course, it’s in the constellation of Cassiopeia, the queen, not Vulpecula, the fox, but still. At 60 trillion kilometers in diameter, it makes a heckuva logo.

Mozilla, you may have a new direction for your branding …

Related Posts:

The Flaming Skull Nebula. Seriously.
A Dying Star With the Wind in Its Hair
A Glowing, Bubbly Bauble in Space
A Star on the Edge of a Weird, Lovely Death
The Green Ghost of a Distant Dead Star

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The Einstein Tower | AMANDA BAUER, astropixie

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Apollo 11 and a Quarter Million Miles | Phil Plait
Bad Astronomy | Saturday, July 20, 2013, at 8:00 AM


^ Only one human being alive on July 21, 1969 is not in this picture. Photo by Michael Collins/NASA

Today is the anniversary of the first time humans set foot upon another world. Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong lifted away from Earth on July 16, 1969, and on July 20, 1969, Aldrin and Amstrong effectively sliced all of history into two different halves.

Collins represents an interesting paradox. While he was one of the three Apollo 11 astronauts to go to the Moon, he didn’t walk on its surface. His task was to stay in orbit, on board the Command Module, while Armstrong and Aldrin cavorted upon the lunar surface.

Some people feel sorry for him, getting almost all the way to the Moon but denied the opportunity to land there.

But he also had a singular opportunity: He became the farthest man in the Universe. When he circled the far side of the Moon, the nearest people to him were thousands of kilometers away, and ignoring them, the rest of humanity was 400,000 kilometers distant. A quarter million miles.

This happenstance is both amazing and melancholy, an experience he describes in his book, “Carrying the Fire”. Musician Simon Lacey read the book, and became so inspired by Collins’ adventure that he wrote several classical pieces of music about it. A friend of Lacey’s, who is a TV editor, agreed to put together a time-lapse video of the Earth seen from the International Space Station, and together they created this wonderful collaboration:



Lovely! The music is sweet, but still with a hint of loneliness to it. The emotional sway of the music makes the connection to Collins more palpable.

This is the first of several pieces by Lacey, and I’m looking forward to seeing the next.

As for Collins, a little while back a picture circulated the ‘net (shown at the top of this post). It shows the Lunar Module carrying Aldrin and Armstrong returning to orbit, about to rendezvous with the Command Module carrying Collins.

You’ve probably seen it; I have looked at this picture countless times. But it still startled me when I saw the caption someone had dreamed up for it: “Michael Collins is the only human being, living or dead, not in the frame of this picture.”

Perhaps that won’t always be true; there will come a time when a picture of the Earth doesn’t encapsulate all of humanity. But for now it does, and while we can’t all experience the feelings Collins had at that time, perhaps, on this day, one of greatest of all anniversaries, the music by Lacey can help us understand them.

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Highlights mine.

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Astrophoto: Venus Rises in the Ashes of Comets | Phil Plait
Bad Astronomy | Sunday, July 21, 2013, at 8:00 AM

There are so many things to love about astronomy, but one of my favorites is when science and beauty merge and become one. The beauty is what first captures your attention, and the science is what makes you look closer and stay enraptured.

May I present to you my evidence: Venus rising into a beam of zodiacal light:


^ Venus in the spotlight. You absolutely want to click this to cythereanate. Photo by Rudi Dobesberger, used by permission

This photo was taken by astrophotographer Rudi Dobesberger, who has dozens upon dozens of similarly stunning pictures on his site (and more jaw-droppers on 500px). He took this photo on Nov. 16, 2012, in the early morning at Kalkalpen National Park in Austria. The sky was very dark; the glow on the left is Vienna (which was 150 km (90 miles) away), and Graz on the right (110 km/70 miles distant). Fog blankets lights from the town in the foreground, further damping light pollution.

Which was a wonderful happenstance, because it allowed the normally-invisible light of zodiacal light to shine through. This glow is due to sunlight reflected by dust shed by countless comets over the eons. These comets all had short-period orbits, most taking only 20 years or less to circle the Sun. Over time, it’s inevitable that such comets would have their orbits heavily influenced by the massive presence of Jupiter; in fact, it’s likely they started as comets on much, much larger orbits, but a close pass by Jupiter bent their paths inward toward the Sun. This warmer environment disintegrated the ice holding the comets together, so as they slowly died they sloughed off megatons of dust.

The orbits of all the planets are aligned fairly well, forming a flat disk: the plane of the solar system. The Earth does too, so we’re in that plane and we see it edge-on, a line across the sky. It passes through a series of constellations, which means the Sun and planets always travel through those constellations. As a group we call them the zodiac.

Those “Jupiter family comets” orbited the Sun in the same plane as the planets, too, so their dust does as well. Put it all together, and you get the lovely term zodiacal light.

So think on this as you look at the picture: That lovely glowing beam apparently spotlighting Venus is actually a vast, flat cloud of dust, circling the Sun out by Jupiter; all that remains of a billion long-dead comets feebly reflecting the fierce light of the Sun so very far away.

See? Certainly the immediate beauty of the picture catches your eye, but it’s the reality behind it that catches your brain.

Tip o’ the lens cap to the Earth Science Picture of the Day.

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^ A History of the Sky | Ken Murphy, 1 year ago

VIMEO NOTES. This is a year-long time-lapse study of the sky. A camera installed on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco captured an image of the sky every 10 seconds. From these images, I created a mosaic of time-lapse movies, each showing a single day. The days are arranged in chronological order. My intent was to reveal the patterns of light and weather over the course of a year.

More information at: murphlab.com/ahots

The music is “Aerial” by Moby, from mobygratis.com (royalty-free music for independent filmmakers).

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More by Amanda Bauer, astronomer

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Pretty Picture from Space: Thunderstorms Over Southern California
Universe Today, Nancy Atkinson | July 25, 2013


^ Early morning lightning storms, inland of LA and San Diego, on July 21, 2013, as seen from the International Space Station. Credit: NASA

Astronaut Karen Nyberg shared this image on her Twitter feed, showing the view from the International Space Station on July 21, 2013 with thunderstorms brewing over Los Angeles and San Diego, California. City lights are peering through the clouds, while lightning brightens the dark storm clouds. A solar array from a Russian spacecraft docked to the ISS appears at the bottom of the image.

Incredible view.

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Timelapse: Super Moon Rising Over the Rocky Mountains
Universe Today, Nancy Atkinson | July 25, 2013


^ A series of photos combined to show the rise of the July 22, 2013 ‘super’ full moon over the Rocky Mountains, shot near Vail, Colorado, at 10,000ft above sea level in the White River National Forest. Moon images are approximately 200 seconds apart. Credit and copyright: Cory Schmitz

Astrophotographer Cory Schmitz braved a brown bear in order to capture some wonderful images of the full Moon rise on July 22, 2013. This composite shows a series of images of the moonrise, and below is a beautiful timelapse.



This perigee Moon, a.k.a “Super Moon” was the third and final of the big full Moons for 2013. However, as astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson mentioned on Twitter, it is “Okay to call tonight’s Full Moon “super” but only if you would call a 13-inch pizza “super” compared with a 12-inch pizza.”

You can catch more of Cory with Fraser on the Virtual Star Parties on Sunday nights. Below are a couple of more great scenes from Cory’s full Moon experience:


^ A bear sits right on the spot where Cory Schmitz wanted to set up his photography equipment. Image courtesy Cory Schmitz.


^ The full-moon illuminated landscape, overlooking Interstate 70, near Vail, Colorado. Credit and copyright: Cory Schmitz.