During a total solar eclipse, the Sun’s extensive outer atmosphere, or corona, is an inspirational sight. Subtle shades and shimmering features that engage the eye span a brightness range of over 10,000 to 1, making them notoriously difficult to capture in a single photograph. But this composite of 7 consecutive digital images over a range of exposure times comes close to revealing the crown of the Sun in all its glory. The telescopic views were recorded from the Isla de Pascua (Easter Island) during July 11′s total solar eclipse and also show solar prominences extending just beyond the edge of the eclipsed sun. Remarkably, features on the dim, near side of the New Moon can also be made out, illuminated by sunlight reflected from a Full Earth.
The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. The question came about as a result of a five dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way:
Alexander Adell and Bertram Lupov were two of the faithful attendants of Multivac. As well as any human beings could, they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face — miles and miles of face — of that giant computer. They had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single human could possibly have a firm grasp of the whole.
Multivac was self-adjusting and self-correcting. It had to be, for nothing human could adjust and correct it quickly enough or even adequately enough — so Adell and Lupov attended the monstrous giant only lightly and superficially, yet as well as any men could. They fed it data, adjusted questions to its needs and translated the answers that were issued. Certainly they, and all others like them, were fully entitled to share In the glory that was Multivac’s.
For decades, Multivac had helped design the ships and plot the trajectories that enabled man to reach the Moon, Mars, and Venus, but past that, Earth’s poor resources could not support the ships. Too much energy was needed for the long trips. Earth exploited its coal and uranium with increasing efficiency, but there was only so much of both.
But slowly Multivac learned enough to answer deeper questions more fundamentally, and on May 14, 2061, what had been theory, became fact.
This magnificent view of the region around the star R Coronae Australis was created from images taken with the Wide Field Imager (WFI) at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. R Coronae Australis lies at the heart of a nearby star-forming region and is surrounded by a delicate bluish reflection nebula embedded in a huge dust cloud. The image reveals surprising new details in this dramatic area of sky.
There’s a good chance that solar flares will send large amounts of magnetic energy our way soon — “sometime around 2013″ (let’s ignore that the popular doomsday, December 21st 2012, falls within that time frame). This solar storm could knock out power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services and emergency radio communications — well, anything sensitive to electromagnetic disturbance.
Normally, I’d be more than a tad skeptical, but here’s what Richard Fisher of NASA’s Heliophysics Division has to say:
The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity. At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms. The intersection of these two issues is what we’re getting together to discuss.
Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years. Dr Fisher, a Nasa scientist for 20 years, said these two events would combine in 2013 to produce huge levels of radiation. He said large swathes of the world could face being without power for several months, although he admitted that was unlikely. A more likely scenario was that large areas, including northern Europe and Britain which have “fragile” power grids, would be without power and access to electronic devices for hours, possibly even days.
Of course, the important question here is whether the iPad is resistant to these solar storms, or if such technology — let’s call it ‘Flare Guard’ — will be introduced through a software update to the Retina Display at a later stage. I’ve reached out to Steve Jobs for a comment, but have not yet received a response.
This is how it looks when a spacecraft like Hayabusa enters the Earth’s atmosphere:
Sparkles!
A group of astronomers from NASA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and other organizations had a front row seat to observe the Hayabusa spacecraft’s fiery plunge into Earth’s atmosphere. The team flew aboard NASA’s DC-8 airborne laboratory, packed with cameras and other imaging instruments, to capture the high-speed re-entry over an unpopulated area of central Australia on June 13, 2010. The Japanese spacecraft completed its seven-year, 1.25 billion mile journey to return a sample of the asteroid Itokawa.
Perhaps the original spiral nebula, M51 is a large galaxy, over 60,000 light-years across, with a readily apparent spiral structure. Also cataloged as NGC 5194, M51 is a part of a well-known interacting galaxy pair, its spiral arms and dust lanes clearly sweeping in front of companion galaxy NGC 5195 (top). This dramatically processed color composite combines M51 image data from the Calar Alto Observatory’s 1.2 meter telescope. The data include long exposures through a narrow hydrogen alpha filter that trace emission from atomic hydrogen. Reddish hydrogen emission regions, called HII regions, are the regions of intense star formation seen to lie mainly along M51′s bright spiral arms. Intriguingly, this composite also shows red hydrogen emission structures in the faint features extending even beyond NGC 5195, toward the top of the frame.
Credit: CAHA, Descubre Foundation, DSA, OAUV, Vicent Peris (OAUV / PixInsight), Jack Harvey (SSRO), Steven Mazlin (SSRO), Carlos Sonnenstein (Valkanik), Juan Conejero (PixInsight).
Zoomed to 6.066e+228 (2^760), this Mandelbrot fractal, which took 6 months to render, will make your room spin around if you stare at it long enough. To put things in perspective: An electron needs to be zoomed to 1E42 to equal the size of the known Universe. This is zoomed to 1E228:
If the music isn’t your taste, disable it by dragging left on the rightmost bars in the player.
Two days to set up, and then six months to render, resulted in around forty 1.9GB uncompressed .AVI files. I added watermarking, fx and time remapping, before multi-pass encoding the 80GB video in h264 (32,768 kbit/sec) and the audio in AAC.
Want some perspective?
1E6 Vancouver Island
1E9 Jupiter’s radius
1E12 Earth’s orbit
1E18 distance to Alpha Centauri
1E21 Milky Way galaxy
1E30 large doesn’t cover it!
1E42 size of electron to the universe
1E228 incomprehensibly big…but we did it!
For the record, 1 to 6e228 is like expanding a proton to 70000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000 times the size of the visible universe.
(Proton has 1 femtometer diameter, universe has 93 billion light year diameter)
If you were actually traveling into the fractal, you would be moving faster than the speed of light.
Super Mario Bros. X is a massive project that blends elements from Super Mario 1, 2, 3 and World. It has many power ups, such as the Hammer Suit, Tanooki Suit, Kuribo’s shoe, The Billy Gun, and many old and new Yoshis. You can also play the game with a friend in the 2 player co-op mode, where the screen seamlessly splits and combines as the players separate and rejoin:
SMBX is most notable for its extensive editor that allows you to create almost any kind of level that you can imagine. The real time editor lets you edit the level while playing it! You can also create your own episode using either the SMB3 or SMW styled world map, or you can create a Mario 64 style hub level and have the players collect stars to advance.
