gazette inspiration collector / on space

La Planète Sauvage (Fantastic Planet) 1973 via Gazette...

gazette-ic — Sun, 26 May 2013 21:29:50 +0300

La Planète Sauvage (Fantastic Planet) 1973

via Gazette Inspiration Collector / The Blog

a suggestion for you that are staying in this Sunday night…

the film’s language is in French with embedded English subtitles. the duration is 1hour and 12mins

Fantastic Planet (French: La Planète sauvage) is a 1973 cutout stop motion science fiction allegorical film directed by René Laloux, production designed by Roland Topor, written by both of them and animated at Jiří Trnka Studio. The film was an international production between France and Czechoslovakia and was distributed in the United States by Roger Corman. It won the special jury prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival. The story is based on the novel Oms en série, by the French writer Stefan Wul. A working title for the film while it was in development was Sur la planète Ygam (On the Planet Ygam). The film had a total of 809,945 admissions in France.

Saturn hurricane snapped by Cassini craft An enormous hurricane...

gazette-ic — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:05:00 +0300

The polar view has become possible because Cassini has changed the angle of its orbit

In the image, red indicates clouds at lower altitudes, with green representing higher altitude

Saturn hurricane snapped by Cassini craft

An enormous hurricane raging at Saturn’s north pole has an eye 2,000km (1,250mi) across - big enough to cover the UK 12 times over.

The striking images of the storm were snapped from a height of 420.000km (260,000mi) by the Cassini spacecraft, which arrived at Saturn in 2004.

They were captured in red and infrared wavelengths and have been false-coloured to show detail.

Scientists say the hurricane’s winds reach a staggering 150m/s (330mph).

But they do not know just how long the storm has been brewing.

When Cassini first arrived, the north pole was in darkness; it was winter in the planet’s 29-Earth-year annual cycle.

Now it has taken some of its first sunlit images of the pole, which has not been seen since the Voyager 2 craft last sent pictures on its fly-by in 1981.

Andrew Ingersoll, a member of the Cassini team based at the California Institute of Technology in California, US, said: “We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth.”

“But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapour in Saturn’s hydrogen atmosphere.”

The team believes the hurricane to be “stuck” at the pole, forced northward by winds in the same way hurricanes tend to move north on Earth.

Cassini caught sight of an even larger storm in 2006 - the first time a hurricane had been seen on another planet.

CONTINUUM trailer by Planetary Collective Remember our previous...

gazette-ic — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:25:00 +0200

CONTINUUM

trailer

by Planetary Collective

Remember our previous video post on our sub-blog on space OVERVIEW?

OVERVIEW is actually the prelude to Planetary Collective’s forthcoming project CONTINUUM, a feature documentary film about our deep interdependence with each other, the planet and the universe. They tell us that this perspective is the key to understanding the grave crises we currently face as a civilisation and as a planet. If you haven’t seen the trailer yet, here it is (video above)…

Planetary Collective a team of three self-taught filmmakers who took a chance, quit their jobs, and have been living in the back of trucks and on people’s floors for nearly two years in order to make this film a reality. And with your support in this final phase they will be able to launch the film in February, 2014. If you haven’t seen the project, please check out the Kickstarter page and make a pledge. There are only 12 days left in the campaign, so please do so before March 24th.

APOD 2013 February 24 M51: The Whirlpool Galaxy in Dust and...

gazette-ic — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 12:31:00 +0200

APOD 2013 February 24

M51: The Whirlpool Galaxy in Dust and Stars
Image Credit: N. Scoville (Caltech), T. Rector (U. Alaska, NOAO) et al., Hubble Heritage Team, NASA

Explanation: The Whirlpool Galaxy is a classic spiral galaxy. At only 30 million light years distant and fully 60 thousand light years across, M51, also known as NGC 5194, is one of the brightest and most picturesque galaxies on the sky. The above image is a digital combination of a ground-based image from the 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory and a space-based image from the Hubble Space Telescope highlighting sharp features normally too red to be seen. Anyone with a good pair of binoculars, however, can see this Whirlpool toward the constellation of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici. M51 is a spiral galaxy of type Sc and is the dominant member of a whole group of galaxies. Astronomers speculate that M51’s spiral structure is primarily due to its gravitational interaction with a smaller galaxy just off the top of the image.

GALE by KORB and ECHOLAB Echolab is a studio specialized in...

gazette-ic — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 11:50:00 +0200

GALE

by KORB and ECHOLAB

Echolab is a studio specialized in sound design. They have imagined with the motion design studio Korb what would the spread of sound be like on Mars. The result is simply amazing, both for visuals and sounds.

Acoustic dust performance on the Red planet (northwestern part of the Aeolis Quadrangle at 5.4˚S, 137.8˚E) by KORB and ECHOLAB.

A gale is very strong wind. Gale is also a crater on Mars where NASA Curiosity rover landed on August 2012. It is the most advanced mobile robotic science lab ever to explore another planet. The rover aims to behave for a Martian year, but the nuclear power source may last for 14 years. What does the future hold for Curiosity? Will Mars rover ever leave Gale Crater?

watch our playlist with all the space video selections

Spinning Black Hole Observed for the First Time Astronomers have...

gazette-ic — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 19:32:00 +0200

Spinning Black Hole Observed for the First Time

Astronomers have conclusively measured the spin of a black hole for the first time by detecting the mind-bending relativistic effects that warp space-time at the very edge of its event horizon — the point of no return, beyond which even light cannot escape.

Will our Universe end in a “big slurp”? Higgs-like...

gazette-ic — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 10:23:00 +0200

Will our Universe end in a “big slurp”?

Higgs-like particle suggests it might

If the “Higgs-like particle” discovered last year is really the long-sought Higgs boson, the bad news is that its mass suggests the universe will end in a fast-spreading bubble of doom. The good news? It’ll probably be tens of billions of years before that particular doomsday arrives.

That’s one of the weirder twists coming out of the continuing analysis of results from Europe’s Large Hadron Collider, which produced the first solid evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson last year. Current theory holds that the Higgs boson plays a role in imparting mass to other fundamental particles. Confirming the discovery of the Higgs would fill in the last blank spot in that theory, known as the Standard Model.

Physicists discussed the state of the Higgs quest in Boston on Monday during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

So far, the particle that was found at the LHC fits all the requirements for the Higgs boson, but scientists aren’t quite ready to confirm that the particle is really, truly the Higgs boson. It could be, say, just the first of multiple particles involved in the process. “The door is still very much open that there’s [another] particle that has a role to play, or even more than that,” said Christopher Hill, a physicist at Ohio State University who is also deputy physics coordinator for the LHC’s Compact Muon Solenoid experiment.

The LHC has just started a two-year shutdown for equipment upgrades — and Howard Gordon, deputy chair of the physics program at Brookhaven National Laboratory, said “it’s going to take another few years” after the collider is restarted to confirm definitively that the newfound particle is the Higgs boson.

In the meantime, physicists have tightened their estimates of the particle’s mass: Hill said the current estimate from the Compact Muon Solenoid is 125.8 billion electron volts, or 125.8 GeV, plus or minus 0.6 GeV. The figure from the LHC’s other Higgs-boson detector, known as ATLAS, is 125.2 GeV, plus or minus 0.7 GeV.

Those figures can be factored into equations that point to the long-term fate of the universe, said Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab.

So what’s the outlook?

“If you use all the physics that we know now, and we do what we think is a straightforward calculation, it’s bad news,” Lykken said. “It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable. At some point, billions of years from now, it’s all going to be wiped out.”

He said the parameters for our universe, including the Higgs mass value as well as the mass of another subatomic particle known as the top quark, suggest that we’re just at the edge of stability, in a “metastable” state. Physicists have been contemplating such a possibility for more than 30 years. Back in 1982, physicists Michael Turner and Frank Wilczek wrote in Naturethat “without warning, a bubble of true vacuum could nucleate somewhere in the universe and move outwards at the speed of light, and before we realized what swept by us our protons would decay away.”

Lykken put it slightly differently: “The universe wants to be in a different state, so eventually to realize that, a little bubble of what you might think of as an alternate universe will appear somewhere, and it will spread out and destroy us.”

That alternate universe would be “much more boring,” Lykken said. Which led him to ask a philosophical question: “Why do we live in a universe that’s just on the edge of stability?” He wondered whether a universe has to be near the danger zone to produce galaxies, stars, planets … and life.

Even Hill found it interesting that the parameters of particle physics put our universe right along the critical line. “That’s something new, which we didn’t know before, and which leads some of us to that there’s something else coming,” Hill said.

When Hill referred to “something else,” he was talking about new discoveries in physics — not the end of the world. Lykken emphasized that it would be at least tens of billions of years before vacuum instability took hold.

“To get the exact number, we need more funding,” he joked.

Read article here

Image Credit: Corbis

20 Hz A Semiconductor work by Ruth Jarman and Joe...

gazette-ic — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 17:22:00 +0200

20 Hz

A Semiconductor work by Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt.

Audio Data courtesy of CARISMA, operated by the University of Alberta, funded by the Canadian Space Agency.

20 Hz observes a geo-magnetic storm occurring in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Working with data collected from the CARISMA radio array and interpreted as audio, we hear tweeting and rumbles caused by incoming solar wind, captured at the frequency of 20 Hertz. Generated directly by the sound, tangible and sculptural forms emerge suggestive of scientific visualisations. As different frequencies interact both visually and aurally, complex patterns emerge to create interference phenomena that probe the limits of our perception.

Made for the exhibition Invisible Fields at Arts Santa Monica in Barcelona Spain.

05.00 minutes. / HD / 2011
HD single channel and HD 3D single channel.
20Hz is co-commissioned by Arts Santa Monica + Lighthouse . Supported by the British Council.

Female Stars in the Galaxy of Science

gazette-ic — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 17:29:00 +0200

source As a double-winner of the Nobel Prize, Marie Curie brought global prestige to the Nobel...

Revealed: first image of a new planet being formed with star...

gazette-ic — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 10:03:00 +0200

Revealed: first image of a new planet being formed with star dust

World’s highest radio telescope captures image (left) providing evidence of how ‘gas’ planets are formed

The world’s highest radio telescope, built on a Chilean plateau in the Andes 5,000 metres above sea level, has captured the first image of a new planet being formed as it gobbles up the cosmic dust and gas surrounding a distant star.

Astronomers have long predicted that giant “gas” planets similar to Jupiter would form by collecting the dust and debris that forms around a young star. Now they have the first visual evidence to support the phenomenon, scientists said.

The image taken by the Atacama Millimetre-submillimetre Array (ALMA) in Chile shows two streams of gas connecting the inner and outer disks of cosmic material surrounding the star HD 142527, which is about 450 light-years from Earth.

Astronomers believe the gas streamers are the result of two giant planets – too small to be visible in this image – exerting a gravitational pull on the cloud of surrounding dust and gas, causing the material to flow from the outer to inner stellar disks, said Simon Casassus of the University of Chile in Santiago.

“The most natural interpretation for the flows seen by ALMA is that the putative proto-planets are pulling streams of gas inward towards them that are channelled by their gravity. Much of the gas then overshoots the planets and continues inward to the portion of the disk close to the star, where it can eventually fall onto the star itself,” Dr Casassus said.

“Astronomers have been predicting that these streams exist, but this is the first time we’ve been able to see them directly. Thanks to the new ALMA telescope, we’ve been able to get direct observations to illuminate current theories of how planets are formed,” he said.

The image, published in the journal Nature, appears to answer a long-standing conundrum of star formation: how does a new sun continue to grow by accumulating cosmic material when orbiting proto-planets are busy gobbling up the same source of cosmic dust and gas, creating huge gaps in the star-forming cloud of material.

“This has been a bit of a mystery, but now we have found a process that allows the star to continue to grow despite the gap,” Dr Casassus said.

OVERVIEW On the 40th anniversary of the famous ‘Blue Marble’...

gazette-ic — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 22:41:00 +0200

OVERVIEW

On the 40th anniversary of the famous ‘Blue Marble’ photograph taken of Earth from space, Planetary Collective presents a short film documenting astronauts’ life-changing stories of seeing the Earth from the outside – a perspective-altering experience often described as the Overview Effect.

The Overview Effect, first described by author Frank White in 1987, is an experience that transforms astronauts’ perspective of the planet and mankind’s place upon it. Common features of the experience are a feeling of awe for the planet, a profound understanding of the interconnection of all life, and a renewed sense of responsibility for taking care of the environment.

OVERVIEW is a short film that explores this phenomenon through interviews with five astronauts who have experienced the Overview Effect. The film also features insights from commentators and thinkers on the wider implications and importance of this understanding for society, and our relationship to the environment.

cast

• EDGAR MITCHELL – Apollo 14 astronaut and founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences
• RON GARAN – ISS astronaut and founder of humanitarian organization Fragile Oasis
• NICOLE STOTT – Shuttle and ISS astronaut and member of Fragile Oasis
• JEFF HOFFMAN – Shuttle astronaut and senior lecturer at MIT
• SHANE KIMBROUGH – Shuttle/ISS astronaut and Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army
• FRANK WHITE – space theorist and author of the book ‘The Overview Effect’
• DAVID LOY - philosopher and author
• DAVID BEAVER – philosopher and co-founder of The Overview Institute

crew

Produced by: GUY REID, STEVE KENNEDY, CHRISTOPHER FERSTAD
Director: GUY REID
Editor: STEVE KENNEDY
Director of Photography: CHRISTOPHER FERSTAD
Original Score: HUMAN SUITS
Dubbing Mixer: PATCH MORRISON

technical info

Filmed with Canon 5D Mk ii.
Additional footage from NASA / ESA archives
Duration: 19 minutes

more info

overviewinstitute.org
Fragile Oasis: fragileoasis.org

Harmonia Macrocosmica by Andreas Cellarius The publication of...

gazette-ic — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 14:42:00 +0200

plate1:Planisphere (mechanism) of Ptolemy, of the heavenly orbits following the hypothesis of Ptolemy laid out in a planar view

plate3:Scenography of the planetary orbits encompassing the Earth

plate4:Planisphere of Copernicus, or the system of the entire created universe according to the hypothesis of Copernicus exhibited in a planar view

plate5:Scenography of the Copernican world system

plate6:Planisphere of Brahe, or the structure of the universe following the hypothesis of Tycho Brahe drawn in a planar view.

plate10:The sizes of the celestial bodies [in some copies the terrestrial sphere has the continents drawn in by hand]

plate15:The (astrological) aspects, such as opposition, conjunction, etc., among the planets

plate19:Selenographic diagram depicting the varying phases and appearances of the Moon by (means of) shading

plate21:Representation (of the motions) of Venus and Mercury

plate26:Northern stellar hemisphere, with the terrestrial hemisphere lying underneath

Harmonia Macrocosmica

by Andreas Cellarius

The publication of Andreas Cellarius’ Harmonia Macrocosmica in 1660 forms the final chapter of an ambitious cartographic project initiated 25 years earlier by the Amsterdam publisher Johannes Janssonius (1588-1664), namely, the publication of an ATLAS in several volumes which described not only the surface of the Earth but the whole of Creation, including the cosmos and its history.

The seeds of this plan had been sown nearly a century earlier by the renowned cartographer Gerard Mercator. In 1569, in the foreword to his Chronologia, Mercator stated his intention to publish an all-encompassing “cosmography”. A multi-volume atlas that would describe not only ancient and modern geography, but also the seas, the cities of the world, the firmament and chronology. Mercator published the first four volumes of his atlas between 1585 and 1589, with a supplementary fifth volume being published by his son Rumold (c. 1545-1599) in 1595.

Following Mercator’s death, his project was taken up by a succession of publishers, but it would be Johannes Janssonius who finally turned it into reality. In 1636 Janssonius and Henricus Hondius published the first version of their Novus Atlas, featuring some 320 maps in four languages. In 1650 Janssonius added a fifth volume, a nautical atlas with supplemental maps of the eastern hemisphere. A further volume was published between 1658 and 1662 and included the cartography of the ancient world.

With the addition of Andreas Cellarius’ Harmonia Macrocosmica in 1660 and an eight-volume compilation describing a number of cities (published in 1657), Janssonius’ “description of the world” - in the meantime entitled the Novus Atlas absolutissimus - was now complete in terms of the form originally envisioned by Mercator almost 100 years previously. In the foreword to his celestial atlas, which he dedicates to the English king Charles II, Andreas Cellarius explains that he originally drafted the plates and celestial maps contained within it solely for his own use, and for lovers of astronomy, but that after repeated appeals from the publisher, he had decided to make them available to a wider public.

a slide show on youtube

wikipedia: The first part of the ATLAS contains copper plate prints depicting the world systems of Claudius Ptolemy, Nicolaus Copernicus and Tycho Brahe. At the end are star maps of the classical and Christian constellations, the latter ones as introduced by Julius Schiller in his Coelum Stellatum Christianum of 1627. Because the atlas also contained plates supporting the then popular view of the Catholic Church, the book was not placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum...

Our Story the video above is inspired from the video below. both...

gazette-ic — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:02:00 +0200

Our Story

the video above is inspired from the video below. both worth watching

video 1:

A tapestry of footage tracing the cosmic and biological origins of our species, set to original music. mp3: melodysheep.bandcamp.com/track/our-story

Video sources:

Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman
Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking
Do We Really Need the Moon? BBC
How Planet Earth Was Made
David Attenborough’s First Life
Dinosaurs Alive
Journey to the Edge of the Universe
Last Day of the Dinosaurs
Walking With Cavemen
Human Planet
Mankind: The Story of All of Us
Hubble Ultra Deep Field
Wonders of the Universe
Quest for Fire
Baraka
The Tree of Life

video 2:

“My final project I made for my video productions class “Cutaway Productions” at my high school. I don’t own the rights to the song or the pictures and I am not trying to claim them, I just did this video for fun and i spent many a hour on it.” drivinman687

Song: Mind Heist (yes it is from Inception)
by: Zack Hemsey

Pictures: from all over the internet

some of the space pictures, are made by the digital artist “antifanfan”

Grounded by Kevin Margo “One astronaut’s journey...

gazette-ic — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 13:06:00 +0300

Grounded

by Kevin Margo

“One astronaut’s journey through space and life ends on a hostile exosolar planet. Grounded is a metaphorical account of the experience, inviting unique interpretation and reflection by the viewer. Themes of aging, inheritance, paternal approval, cyclic trajectories, and behaviors passed on through generations are explored against an ethereal backdrop. About this Tip Jar - Did Grounded inspire you? My dad’s life inspired me and his death inspired Grounded. 100% proceeds of this Tip Jar (note vimeo’s 15% service fee) goes to the American Cancer Society in memory of Paul Vincent Margo. Or donate yourself to www.cancer.org “

Kevin’s website / Grounded website / Credits

The Scale of the Universe 2 What does the universe look like on...

gazette-ic — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 17:30:00 +0300

The Scale of the Universe 2

What does the universe look like on small scales? On large scales? Humanity is discovering that the universe is a very different place on every proportion that has been explored. For example, so far as we know, every tiny proton is exactly the same, but every huge galaxy is different. On more familiar scales, a small glass table top to a human is a vast plane of strange smoothness to a dust mite — possibly speckled with cell boulders. Not all scale lengths are well explored — what happens to the smallest mist droplets you sneeze, for example, is a topic of active research — and possibly useful to know to help stop the spread of disease. The below interactive flash animation, a modern version of the classic video Powers of Ten, is a new window to many of the known scales of our universe. By moving the scroll bar across the bottom, you can explore a diversity of sizes, while clicking on different items will bring up descriptive information. (text source)

experience it on the official website on it’s actual size

You need a more recent version of Adobe Flash Player.

Flash Animation Credit & Copyright : Cary & Michael Huang

14 year old Cary said he invites people to correct any errors they find. This is the second version.

______
Powers of Ten is a 1968 American documentary film written and directed by Charles and Ray Eames. The film depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten (see also logarithmic scale and order of magnitude)
duration 9 mins

The Average Color of the Universe Credit: Karl Glazebrook &...

gazette-ic — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 12:29:00 +0300

The Average Color of the Universe

Credit: Karl Glazebrook & Ivan Baldry (JHU)

Explanation: What color is the universe? More precisely, if the entire sky were smeared out, what color would the final mix be? This whimsical question came up when trying to determine what stars are commonplace in nearby galaxies. The answer, depicted above, is a conditionally perceived shade of beige. To determine this, astronomers computationally averaged the light emitted by one of the largest sample of galaxies yet analyzed: the 200,000 galaxies of the 2dF survey. The resulting cosmic spectrum has some emission in all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, but a single perceived composite color.

via NASA

In the shadows of Saturn’s rings Titan appears to be strung like...

gazette-ic — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 18:51:00 +0300

In the shadows of Saturn’s rings

Titan appears to be strung like a bead on Saturn’s rings, which cast shadows onto the southern hemisphere of the gas giant in this beautiful image from Cassini.

Faint but exquisite detail in the gas giant’s upper atmosphere paints a tranquil scene. A thin band of bright white ammonia ice clouds is etched into the planet’s disc towards the top of the image while clouds dotted below are faded scars of a huge storm that raged across the planet through much of 2011.

Shadows cast by Saturn’s iconic rings appear painted onto the planet’s southern hemisphere in two thick bands broken by thin, lighter stripes, reflecting the intricacies of the individual rings. As Saturn’s seasons progress towards northern hemisphere summer, the rings will appear to grow wider and wider.

Meanwhile Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, appears to hang on the planet’s rings like a bead on a necklace. The effect is a result of the line-of-sight viewing position; Titan orbits Saturn at an average distance of 1,221,870 km.

reblogged from unknownskywalker

Transit of Venus On June 5th, 2012, Venus will pass across the...

gazette-ic — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 10:53:00 +0300

Transit of Venus

On June 5th, 2012, Venus will pass across the face of the sun, producing a silhouette that no one alive today will likely see again.

Transits of Venus are very rare, coming in pairs separated by more than a hundred years. This June’s transit, the bookend of a 2004-2012 pair, won’t be repeated until the year 2117. Fortunately, the event is widely visible. Observers on seven continents, even a sliver of Antarctica, will be in position to see it

The nearly 7-hour transit begins at 3:09 pm Pacific Daylight Time (22:09 UT) on June 5th. The timing favors observers in the mid-Pacific where the sun is high overhead during the crossing. In the USA, the transit will at its best around sunset. That’s good, too. Creative photographers will have a field day imaging the swollen red sun “punctured” by the circular disk of Venus.

Observing tip: Do not stare at the sun. Venus covers too little of the solar disk to block the blinding glare. Instead, use some type of projection technique or a solar filter. A #14 welder’s glass is a good choice…more

check the links below for more info
link 1

link 2

The Transit of Venus / myth

LIVE link from NASA on 5th of June

Photo

gazette-ic — Wed, 02 May 2012 17:56:00 +0300

Lumerence by Miwa Matreyek music “Quite” by Careful

gazette-ic — Tue, 01 May 2012 14:44:00 +0300

Lumerence

by Miwa Matreyek

music “Quite” by Careful