Awesome astrophotography from the South Downs | Science | The Guardian
To mark the start of the Dark Skies Festival today, here are some fantastic photographics taken not that far from Brighton.
Tags: stars
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Friday, February 11th, 2022
Wednesday, March 10th, 2021
So your grandmother is a starship now: a quick guide for the bewildered
Useful FAQs.
Your grandmother is not just a starship, she’s a highly individual starship with her own goals and needs!
Thursday, February 11th, 2021
A Black Cloud of Computation
SETI—the Search for Extra Terrestrial Information processing:
What we get is a computational device surrounding the Asymptotic Giant Branch star that is roughly the size of our Solar System.
Saturday, November 30th, 2019
The Size of Space
Celestial objects ordered by size, covering a scale from one astronaut to the observable universe.
Thursday, July 26th, 2018
Figures in the Stars
A lovely bit of data visualisation from Nadieh showing the differences and commonalities in constellations across cultures. As always, she’s written up the process too.
Friday, April 6th, 2018
Starability - Accessible rating system demo
Accessible star ratings (progressively enhanced from radio buttons) with lots of animation options. The code is on Github.
Monday, January 22nd, 2018
Seedship
A thoroughly enjoyable adventure game in your browser. You are the AI of a colony starship. Humanity’s future is in your hands.
Monday, September 25th, 2017
Constellation charts
Refresh to get a new randomly generated constellation.
A lovely bit of creative JS from Emily
Sunday, June 4th, 2017
Hertzsprung-Russell diagram animation | ESA/Hubble
When I was in Düsseldorf for this year’s excellent Beyond Tellerrand conference, I had the pleasure of meeting Nadieh Bremer, data visualisation designer extraordinaire. I asked her a question which is probably the equivalent of asking a chef what their favourite food is: “what’s your favourite piece of data visualisation?”
There are plenty of popular answers to this question—the Minard map, Jon Snow’s cholera map—but we had just been chatting about Nadieh’s previous life in astronomy, so one answer popped immediately to mind: the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.
Saturday, October 29th, 2016
Discovery of peculiar periodic spectral modulations in a small fraction of solar type stars
We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an ETI signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis.
Monday, December 14th, 2015
My latest Twitter bot: @5point9billion (14 Dec., 2015, at Interconnected)
I always loved Matt’s light cone project—it was a big influence on the Radio Free Earth hack that I made with Chloe. Now it has been reborn as a Twitter bot. Here’s Matt’s documentation for his future self:
I haven’t made a habit of project write-ups before, but I’m taking an increasingly “long now” approach to the tech I make and use. How will I remember what I made in a decade? By reading this post.
Sunday, November 29th, 2015
Our Generation Ships Will Sink / Boing Boing
Kim Stanley Robinson pours cold water on the premise of generation starships for crewed interstellar travel.
The more I hear about Aurora, the more I think I might enjoy reading it.
Thursday, June 12th, 2014
Friday, July 26th, 2013
100,000 Stars
A gorgeous interactive visualisation of our local galactic neighbourhood.
Tuesday, June 12th, 2012
ISS Star Trails - a set on Flickr
Beautiful time-lapse photography from Don “we’ve got a Dragon by the tail” Pettit, taken from the International Space Station.
Tuesday, September 13th, 2011
The country songs of distant Earth
I flew into Nashville on the weekend for the Breaking Development conference, which is proving to be excellent so far.
The event is taking place within the Gaylord Opryland (stop sniggering). It’s a very unusual environment. At one point it was a theme park. Now it’s a complex of hotel buildings, parks and restaurants all contained under a glass and metal ceiling. The whole place feels like it’s hermetically sealed—the ideal place to hole up during a zombie apocalypse.
I’ve been inside this world since Saturday evening. I have memories of the outside world. I remember the feeling of a breeze on my face, the sun on my skin. I remember the cash-based monetary system used by the surface dwellers; so inefficient compared to the unique identifier contained in my room key.
I began to realise that, in the absence of any evidence that I was in fact still in Tennessee, it was entirely possible that this self-contained ecosystem was not necessarily earthbound. What if I’m in an orbital habitat? Or a generation starship?
I’ve been surreptitiously attempting to explore the shape of the complex—without drawing too much attention to myself (I think they’re watching)—trying to figure out if I’m in a Stanford torus or, more likely, a Bernal sphere.
The builders have created a near-flawless illusion of the homeworld. The climate control has been consistent and the gravity is a perfect Earth 1. I’m a little nervous about the possibility of a meteor penetrating the shell and causing decompression problems, but I think they must have a phalanx of automated lasers on the outside hull to take care of that eventuality.
There are plenty of plants under the glass dome, which should ensure a renewable supply of food. Strangely, I haven’t seen any animals (apart from fish) but most of the food available in the restaurant appears to be meat-based.
I don’t know how long the voyage will last. I don’t even know where our destination lies. But so far there are no hardships to endure. Our hosts are ensuring our psychological wellbeing with a plentiful supply of piped music …though why it is exclusively country music remains a mystery to me. We are, after all, a long, long way from Nashville.
Monday, August 8th, 2011
100 Year Starship Study
Now this looks like a fascinating project …and there’s a symposium happening in Florida at the end of September with Jill Tartar, Stewart Brand and more. I want to go to there.
Monday, July 6th, 2009
Stellarium
A free open source planetarium for your computer.
Saturday, February 21st, 2009
Code: Flickr Developer Blog » Found in space
The “blind astrometry server” is a program which monitors the Astrometry group on Flickr, looking for new photos of the night sky. It then analyzes each photo, and from the unique star positions shown it figures out what part of the sky was photographed and what interesting planets, galaxies or nebulae are contained within.
Sunday, March 26th, 2006
Don't Fuck With Love by The Sad Little Stars
A beautifully shot pop-up book style video.