astronomy
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Imaging Source Astronomy Cameras for gazing at the heavens
Stellar photography seems like a wondrous thing: you and a loved one on a starry night taking beautiful images of the heavens -- before making out. Unfortunately, anyone who has tried it knows it's more often a frustrating exercise of fiddling with exposure and aperture settings on your SLR while it hangs precariously off the side of your telescope, held in place only by a flimsy adapter ring. The Imaging Source has a simpler option, a series of digital cameras designed for slotting into your scope like an eye piece, capturing the night sky at up to 60-minute exposures over USB or FireWire. The range starts at $390 for a monochromatic VGA model, going all the way up to $870 for color and 1280 x 960 resolution. Not cheap, but it's probably a lot less than you paid for the equatorial mount on your new reflector. [Via Picture Snob; thanks Jay]
WorldWide Telescope: Works great on a Mac (if you have Windows)
You might have heard that Microsoft Research has released WorldWide Telescope (WWT), it's software to devour the universe whole provide a fun way to browse the planets and stars. The BBC mentioned that you can run WWT on your Mac ... so long as you have Windows on your Mac. Sigh. VMWare helpfully gave the system a try, though, and found it worked great (and even posted a video about it.) I fired up the ol' Boot Camp and saw it wasn't bad. It boasts high-resolution photography of many parts of the sky, and is reasonably easy to use (for a Microsoft product). There were some weird, annoying flicker problems, but I'll chalk that up to the fact that it's beta software on a MacBook with a pokey graphics card. As an amateur astronomer with his own 10-inch Dob (that's right, ladies), I tend to use astronomy software less as a casual browsing tool, but more to find interesting things in the sky on a particular night. And for that, WWT ain't great. You won't find any satellites (like Iridium flares) in WWT. Worst of all -- there's no horizon I could easily find. (Found it, thanks to commenter dh!) So good luck trying to find that fuzzy thing next to the blue thing when it's under your feet. The Mac, however, is blessed with a great variety of native astronomy tools, most of which are free. Stellarium is excellent, free planetarium software. It's worth noting that Google Earth has a spiffy sky tool built-in, too. Last but not least, Starry Night Pro is the king of all astronomy software (and my favorite), but is a little spendy at $150.
Weekly Webcomic Wrapup looks up at the stars
Have you ever just looked up at the stars, trying to make your own constellations ... and suddenly everything becomes a star cluster of Pac-Man-related shapes? (Imave via The Librarianist) Here are our picks for the week's best game-related webcomics; voting after the break. Real Life Application (Sharcbate) Battle Fighter III: Hyper Edition (Truck Bearing Kibble) Starcraft Blues (Extra Life) p=mv (Digital Unrest) The Expected Result (Penny Arcade) Oh, you're choosing fire? (Super Effective) Options (CAD) Grand Theft Dinosaur (Dino Comics) Define Addiction (2P Start) It's DYN-O-MITE (Dueling Analogs) "I'd be less nervous" (A Softer World)
Keep reaching for the stars (with your DS)
Astro Arts' Hoshi Navi (Star Navi) is an interactive star chart for the DS. It features a guide to star names, sunrise and sunset times (as well as those for the moon), and an encyclopedia of astronomical phenomena. It's designed by Astro Arts, who operates the Astro Arts astronomy website and also publishes astronomy magazines in Japan. They seem to have an interest in sharing astronomy with the masses, so it makes sense that they'd be looking to the DS.Hoshi Navi has a feature that would set it apart from other star-navigating software on the DS even if there were some: it has six-way tilt sensitivity, and allows you to look around the sky by tilting the DS. We assume you have to enter a starting location so it will start its display near you.
Three web apps for space cadets with iPhones
If you're a space freak, then you'll want to have a look at these three super-cool web apps for your iPhone or iPod Touch. iSkyGaze tells you where to find various objects in the sky, depending on your location and the time of day. Sure, it'll show you where to look to see the sun and moon, but iSkyGaze also helps you spot things in deep space, like the Orion Nebula. This cool app even tells you how far away the object is, and the best time to see it.Want to know how the sky looked on any given date from the past 10 years? Starry Night Mobile will tell you. It can also predict what your overhead view will be 10 years into the future. Just enter a zip code, landmark, or address and let the app do the calculating for you. If checking out satellites or the International Space Station as it passes overhead is more your thing, then you'll love LookUp. Once you enter your location, the app will tell the precise time various orbiting objects will zoom by, complete with exact elevation stats and how much time you'll have to see it before it dips below the horizon.Oh, and here's a bonus app for all you werewolves.
Gates and space-ace Simonyi gift $30m for giant telescope
The currently terrestrial Bill Gates and his former (and space-faring) Microsoft colleague, Charles Simonyi, have donated a cool $30m to a project that aims to build "the world's largest survey telescope" (cleverly) called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. On Thursday, the group said that Gates and Simonyi had donated $10m and $20m respectively to help develop the telescope, which Gates says "is truly an Internet telescope, which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to explore." The 8.4-meter telescope, which sports three large mirrors and three refractive lenses, will be built on a mountain in northern Chile and is scheduled to decimate the magic of your astronomy club in 2014.
Clockwork model of the solar system is straight out of Myst
We've seen some far-out personal astronomy devices, but this mechanical "planetarium" from Richard Mille is also one of the most intricate pieces of clockwork we've ever come across. The model, which took 10 years to develop, displays the time, date, signs of the zodiac, phases of the moon, and relative placement of the planets in the solar system, and runs for 15 days once its spring windings are fully tightened. No word on price, but since Mille handbuilt just one of these, we're guessing "not cheap" would be a strong first guess.[Via Watch Luxus]
Mammoth liquid mirror telescope could be constructed on the moon
Roger Angel's idea to launch a 100-meter liquid mirror telescope on the moon is far from the only mammoth-sized dream that could be headed into space, and if the feasibility study shows enough promise, it just might happen. The University of Arizona astronomer mentioned that the idea of putting an "enormous liquid-mirror telescope on the moon that could be hundreds of times more sensitive than the Hubble Space Telescope" had been around awhile, but apparently it's finally getting the attention it deserves. If constructed, it would easily be the largest ever built, and would reportedly allow scientists to "study the oldest and most distant objects in the universe, including the very first stars." The project is being investigated on behalf of NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts, and while these type devices are "relatively cheap" to build, it should be noted that it's being compared (at least financially) to the $4.5 billion James Webb Space Telescope. Now, where's the signup sheet for freelance contractors to get in on the moon-based build process?[Via Wired]
Star Trek-style deflector shield to fend off harmful radiation
When you've got folks dreaming up such things as a $2.5 trillion "space sunshade," we reckon a Star Trek-style deflector shield isn't too far-fetched. Apparently, a team of British scientists are looking into the possibility of crafting such a device in order to " protect astronauts from radiation" when they venture beyond the Earth's protective magnetic envelope, or "magnetosphere." Reportedly, the team is hoping to "to mimic the magnetic field which protects the Earth" and deploy the shields "around spacecraft and on the surfaces of planets to deflect harmful energetic particles." As nation's begin to revive plans of space exploration, the homegrown shield should look mighty attractive at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting, but details concerning a proposed launch date, and moreover, the presumably lofty pricetag, have yet to emerge.[Via Slashdot]
Meade intros mySKY Personal Planetarium
It may not let you take deep space photographs, but Meade's new mySKY Personal Planetarium should help to give you a better sense of your cosmic environs, and also double as a suitable ray gun prop in your next no-budget sci-fi movie. To keep things simple, Meade's thankfully packed some GPS capabilities into the device, which should keep it properly aligned at all times with no input needed from you. Those GPS capabilities can also be extended to any Meade AutoStar-enabled telescope, with the mySKY doubling as a control unit for the telescope. In either configuartion, the device will let you find and identify more than 30,000 astronomical objects, displaying all the relevant information on its 480 x 234 LCD. You'll need to be fairly serious about your backyard astronomy to consider one of these though, with it set to demand a hefty $400 when it's released next month.
Mount an iSight on a telescope
Aaron Adams (yes the switcher) is both a Mac geek and an astronomy buff so it makes perfect sense that he would want to combine the two into an unholy amalgam of telescope and iSight.Ok, so it is a little more elegant than that. Aaron was nice enough to post directions and example shots that he took using this rig. It looks pretty sweet to me. Now if only I had a telescope and didn't live in the middle of Philadelphia.
DALSA ships 111 megapixel CCD
Don't expect to see one of these in a commercial DSLR anytime soon (especially now that Mamiya has left the game), but a division of DALSA Semiconductor has successfully manufactured and delivered a 111 megapixel image sensor that's only been topped on these pages by the 500 megapixel monster inside Fermilab's Dark Energy Camera. Putting even the highest-resolution bacteria-based cam to shame, the new 4-inch-square CCD features an array of 10,560 x 10,560 pixels, and was developed in conjunction with Semiconductor Technology Associates to aid the U.S. Naval Observatory's Astrometry Department in precisely determining the position and motion of celestial objects. While you probably can't afford to hire DALSA to build another one of these just for you, there's at least one option on the market that will give you the hundred-plus megapixel bragging rights you seek without breaking the bank: Better Light's 144 megapixel E-HS medium format backing, which, while technically only capturing 48 megapixels per color (and taking at least 66 seconds to do so), should still be enough to impress even your EOS 1Ds Mark II-sporting friends.
Japanese researchers invent completely transparent material
In a breakthrough that could benefit fields as diverse as networking, photography, astronomy, and peeping, science-types at Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research have unveiled their prototype of a glass-like material that they claim to be 100% transparent. Unlike normal glass, which reflects some of the incoming light, the new so-called metamaterial --composed of a grid of gold or silver nanocoils embedded in a prism-shaped, glass-like material -- uses its unique structural properties to achieve a negative refractive index, or complete transparency. Although currently just a one-off proof-of-concept (pictured, under an electron microscope), mass-produced versions of the new material could improve fiber optic communications, contribute to better telescopes and cameras, or lead to the development of completely new optical equipment.
