Starship Asterisk*

• -----------------------------------------------
  . They heard, and up they sprung upon the wing
  . Innumerable. As when the potent rod
  . Of Amram's son, in Egypt's evil day,
  . Waved round the coast, up call'd a pitchy cloud
  . Of locusts, warping on the eastern wind
  . That o'er the realm of impious Pharaoh hung
  . Like night, and darken'd all the realm of Nile,
  . So numberless were they. - Paradise Lost.
  -----------------------------------------------
  ___ As You Like It Act 3, Scene 3
  
  JAQUES: And will you, being a man of your breeding, be
  ___ married under a bush like a beggar? Get you to
  ___ church, and have a good priest that can tell you
  ___ what marriage is: this fellow will but join you
  ___ together as they join wainscot; then one of you will
  ___ prove a shrunk panel and, like green timber, warp, warp.
  -----------------------------------------------

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_warp_%28science_fiction%29 wrote:
<<The terms time warp, space warp and time-space warp are commonly used in science non-fiction. They sometimes refer to Einstein's theory that time and space form a continuum which bends, folds or warps from the observer's point of view, relative to such factors as movement or gravitation, but are also used in reference to more fantastic notions of discontinuities or other irregularities in spacetime not based on real-world science. In science fiction, "warp drive" is often a name given to travel faster than the speed of light. Notably in the Star Trek television series Warp Factor is a name given to the number of times faster than light the fictional spacecraft has effectively moved.>>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_time_warping wrote:
<<Dynamic time warping is an algorithm for measuring similarity between two sequences which may vary in time or speed. For instance, similarities in walking patterns would be detected, even if in one video the person was walking slowly and if in another he or she were walking more quickly, or even if there were accelerations and decelerations during the course of one observation. A well known application has been automatic speech recognition, to cope with different speaking speeds.

In general, DTW is a method that allows a computer to find an optimal match between two given sequences (e.g. time series) with certain restrictions. The sequences are "warped" non-linearly in the time dimension to determine a measure of their similarity independent of certain non-linear variations in the time dimension. This sequence alignment method is often used in the context of hidden Markov models. DTW is an algorithm particularly suited to matching sequences with missing information, provided there are long enough segments for matching to occur.

The extension of the problem for two-dimensional "series" like images (planar warping) is NP-complete,
while the problem for one-dimensional signals like time series can be solved in polynomial time.>>

orin stepanek wrote:An interesting picture; though not a favorite.

• • It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
  Potter: Look at you. You used to be so cocky. You were going to go out and conquer the world. You once called me "a warped, frustrated, old man!" What are you but a warped, frustrated young man? A miserable little clerk crawling in here on your hands and knees and begging for help. No securities, no stocks, no bonds. Nothin' but a miserable little $500 equity in a life insurance policy.

owlice wrote:I'm wondering what the reddish streak from ground to sky on the right side of the image is.

orin stepanek wrote:An interesting picture; though not a favorite.

bystander wrote:

orin stepanek wrote:An interesting picture; though not a favorite.

I'm with Orin on this. I'm just not that enamored with star trails, except those of the galactic kind. The different stellar colors are interesting, though.

Ann wrote:And today's APOD is nice enough because there are two apparent centers of the star trails. Ordinarily, though, I'm not a fan of star trail pictures. It frankly drives me nuts that I can't identify the stars!

owlice wrote:I'm wondering what the reddish streak from ground to sky on the right side of the image is.

owlice wrote:David, I'd missed that! Thank you!!

biddie67 wrote:warped -or- non-warped, I'm confused as to how a location so far south in the southern hemisphere can still see part of the star trails around the northern celestrial pole ??????

DavidLeodis wrote:
I've just realised that I have been a bit slow in regards to "The near vertical red arcs at the centre and far left of the image are the navigation lights of a passing jet aircraft". I cannot readily discern those red arcs in the image but that on the far right is very obvious, so I wonder if at least that said to be in the far left is a mistake and should say far right (or perhaps I need better eye sight!).

Chris Peterson wrote: ]
From the location of the observatory (latitude 33°S) it is possible to see stars from declination -90° to declination +57°. That means that about 2/3 of the northern stars are visible, which looks pretty much like what the image is showing.

neufer wrote:

DavidLeodis wrote:
I've just realised that I have been a bit slow in regards to "The near vertical red arcs at the centre and far left of the image are the navigation lights of a passing jet aircraft". I cannot readily discern those red arcs in the image but that on the far right is very obvious, so I wonder if at least that said to be in the far left is a mistake and should say far right (or perhaps I need better eye sight!).

Since the image was taken in the Southern Hemisphere you must stand on your head to observe it properly...thus making the red arc on the far left.

bystander wrote:There are actually three red arcs, on the left, center, and right. The one on the left is a continuation of the one on the right (top third of the frame). The one in the center is just right of the left observatory.