Just something pretty I found on my drive… click for high-res.
Watch distant worlds dance around their sun
In 2008, HR8799 was the first extrasolar planetary system ever directly imaged. Now, the famed system stars in its very own video.
Using observations collected over the past 12 years, Northwestern University astrophysicist Jason Wang has assembled a stunning time lapse video of the family of four planets — each more massive than Jupiter — orbiting their star. The video gives viewers an unprecedented glimpse into planetary motion.
“It’s usually difficult to see planets in orbit,” Wang said. “For example, it isn’t apparent that Jupiter or Mars orbit our sun because we live in the same system and don’t have a top-down view. Astronomical events either happen too quickly or too slowly to capture in a movie. But this video shows planets moving on a human time scale. I hope it enables people to enjoy something wondrous.”
The Moon doesn’t currently have an independent time. Each lunar mission
uses its own timescale that is linked, through its handlers on Earth, to
coordinated universal time, or UTC —
the standard against which the planet’s clocks are set. But this method
is relatively imprecise and spacecraft exploring the Moon don’t
synchronize the time with each other. The approach works when the Moon
hosts a handful of independent missions, but it will be a problem when
there are multiple craft working together. Space agencies will also want
to track them using satellite navigation, which relies on precise
timing signals.
A Single-Resistor Radio Transmitter, Thanks To The Power Of Noise
This witchcraft is made possible thanks to Johnson noise, also known as
Johnson-Nyquist noise, which is the white noise generated by charge
carriers in a conductor. In effect, the movement of electrons in a
material thanks to thermal energy produces noise across the spectrum.
Reducing interference from Johnson noise is why telescopes often have
their sensors cooled to cryogenic temperatures. Rather than trying to
eliminate Johnson noise, these experiments use it to build an RF
transmitter, and with easily available and relatively cheap equipment.
In the six decades since the publication of the original Dune novel in 1965, the science fiction franchise has gone through many different typographic identities. Notable examples include the use of Giorgio for the British paperbacks by NEL (c. 1968) and Albertus for David Lynch’s movie adaptation (1984). But another typeface has even stronger ties to Dune and its author. It appeared on the covers of dozens of books, including the classic Dune trilogy and its sequels, and also on other titles by – or about – Frank Herbert, from various imprints. Strangely enough, the name of this typeface is barely known even among die-hard fans.
Billions of Celestial Objects Revealed in Gargantuan Survey of the Milky Way
Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane of
the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion
celestial objects — arguably the largest such catalog so far. The data
for this unprecedented survey were taken with the Dark Energy Camera,
built by the US Department of Energy, at the NSF’s Cerro Tololo
Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab.
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