h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"I just came across this positively stunning firsthand account by Bill Weaver, an SR-71 test pilot. In 1966, Weaver was flying an SR-71 at full speed, Mach 3.18, when it abruptly and catastrophically disintegrated. Somehow, he survived the breakup. He didn't eject; the plane just tore itself apart around him and scattered in all directions. In other words, he suddenly found himself flying along at Mach 3.18 ... without his plane. It's a mind-boggling story." - Randall Monroe (XKCD/What if?)

http://www.roadrunnersinternationale.com/roadrunner_blog/?p=188

That is truly amazing.

I'm proud to say I played a very small part in making this happen. A fellow I know who works in graphics for NASA with their Public Affairs Office contacted me several weeks ago asking me if I knew anyone through our website that might be able to assist them with getting permission to make a crew poster for the upcoming Expedition 42 ISS mission. I gave him some names, most notably, Robbie Stamp and Polly Adams. Anyway, he must have gotten through to the family somehow because this was announced on Tuesday.

http://www.space.com/27275-space-station-s-42-crew-links-expedition-to-hitchhiker-s-guide.html



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I've put a few night sky time lapse videos up here. They're always pleasant to look at.

They get a bit more unsettling when you change the frame of reference. This video shows some of those same videos but has used image stabilization to show the earth moving in relation to the Milky Way galaxy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkn2ZXWDl6k

Challenge: see if you can determine roughly which direction the camera is pointing and the general location of the camera.


*I'm not saying I can do this.

Me neither, but it's quite enchanting

I bet Gnomon could do it.

Well, I do see the Magellanic clouds in the opening scenes.

The imaging of the Milky Way Galaxy against a clear blue daylight sky that comes up later is stunning.

I didn't know that this instrument had that capability.

Here's a very, up-close and personal look at our neighbor.

This week, NASA released the highest resolution image yet of the Andromeda galaxy. Here's a video fly-thru of the image that gives you just a hint of what it feels like to look at a trillion stars.


http://youtu.be/udAL48P5NJU

I should note, you can seriously choke your computer and net connection with this by trying to watch it at 4K resolution.

That's one way to prove Virgin Media can't keep up with a 4K feed.

The 4K setting has crashed my PC twice (bluescreen the first time), so I'm downloading the file to see if the same thing happens when I play it with VLC. Firefox is telling me it's almost half a gigabyte.

I had to downshift to the 1440p res on my work computer... at NASA.



It was playing 4k, but it was stuttering and buffering.

If you want to d/l the full version, there's a link from the source in this reddit comment:

http://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/2rj6x6/want_to_get_an_idea_what_a_trillion_stars_looks/cngcdqa

The .mp4 plays fine in VLC, and it is quite beautiful

Here is an absolutely beautiful bit of science. NASA satellite data demonstrating the movements of various aerosols in the atmosphere. I can watch this one over and over.

http://climate.nasa.gov/news/2218/

Mind you, the consequences of this is dire. It's beautiful despite the context.

I enjoyed watching that one too, despite the consequences. I like the way it shows up weather systems such as Atlantic depressions, or hurricanes forming off the coast of west Africa, travelling across the Atlantic towards America and then being picked up by the Gulf Stream and fired back towards the UK, and especially the part where it's directly over Antarctica, showing all those systems circling the continent.

Being a trained photographer, I'm a bit of a lighting geek and I've never been as impressed as I am with this system.


An artificial "sky light" that is completely realistic.

http://weburbanist.com/2015/02/17/new-artificial-lighting-tricks-human-brain-into-seeing-sunlight/


Currently prices are listed in 5 digits, but if they can get this down to a few hundred dollars (or quid) this would be absolutely worth the price. Imagine having realistic daylight, all year long, in a basement.

Quite a while back, I believe it was in this thread, I posted a video showing that most of us were eating bananas "wrongly" by breaking the stem first rather than pealing it from the other end.

Well, here's another on that theme.


We also eat apples the wrong way. Twist off the stem and start from the bottom. (I used a fingernail and dug out the dried remains of the flower bud.) You can eat the entire apple this way, discarding the seeds. I had to try this myself before I could endorse it. It works. There was nothing about the "core" that I found distasteful. At worst I got a bit of it stuck in my teeth, but that was easily removed.

http://youtu.be/vdCGnuccRv0

When can we expect directions on how to eat raspberries?

Eating the core of an apple is something I've done since I was a kid. There's supposed to be arsenic in the pips, so I understand, but... still here