Starship Asterisk*

Just as a bit of play with universes and those exotic ideas of multiple dimensions, I imagined two high-dimensional bubbles intersecting, whose intersection 'circle' is our 4-dimensional universe. At first the intersection is an infinitesimal point; then, as the intersection deepens, it expands dram...

Dear All, TV programme UK BBC4 tonight 11 Oct 2020 at 2200 BST (2100 UTC): The Sky at Night Tonight's programme reports on the work by vision-impaired astronomers using techniques of sound and touch. With University of Portsmouth Institute of Cosmology & Gravitation Tactile Universe team's Nicol...

Hi all - In the context of pollution (or its reduction), I've been wondering whether you can take a ground-based stellar spectrograph for a star, and then 'subtract' spaceborne readings for the same star, to give you an indication of our own atmosphere's intervening pollutants/gases and their likely...

Yes, it's all very concerning. I'm glad we can still stare up at the stars and see the liberating imagery on APOD. In so many ways we're luckier than our 1918 pandemic forbears. One of the loneliest places just now must be the ISS. I wouldn't recommend old magazines for, er, um, posterior hygiene pu...

Dear all, [I just did a search in hope I wasn't duplicating an existing topic; sorry if I missed one after all] After 9/11, as I recall, after just a few days of almost no air traffic over the US, the daily peak temperature range (lowest night-time, highest daytime temperatures) expanded dramaticall...

These are great. Thanks, all. I do still wonder if, for a photon travelling at 'c', an enormous journey (as we describe it) in the future Universe would nevertheless seem (to the photon) to be an instant . Anyway, I can't ask any photon for its opinion and, as you'll no doubt have guessed, I'm not t...

Talk of the fate of Betelgeuse got me thinking (again) about how a photon 'sees' the Universe. With the time-dilation of lightspeed a photon should experience its emission, and reception somewhere, somewhen, as an indivisible 'event' without duration or distance. For our part, we tend to think of th...

These are helpful, thanks to both. I guess observers will always be on the lookout for variations in rotation as well.

I get the idea that outgassing could change 'Oumuamua's velocity; but I understand that the object is tumbling. Therefore how would any outgassing have a useful constant direction? Could the outgassing be so rapidly responsive e.g. to the Sun's heat that it still manages to outgas preferentially on ...

My enduring favourite is Home from Above , at https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap101115.html - a print goes everywhere with me in the back of my sketchbook. It has something of 19thC Romantic landscape (+ portraiture) about it. A fabulous view. Other more detailed photos of the interior of the Cupola show...

Dark Matter seems not to interact with anything we can detect, or to reveal itself except by gravitational effects. But is it thought to interact with itself ? What might happen when galactic haloes meet - for example our galaxy and M31 in Andromeda? Two pennies, placed about twenty diameters apart,...

What I notice about this picture is the lace-doily appearance: despite its 3D globular aspect, there are many little 'hollows' in the outer reaches, reminiscent of grass tussocks in an arid landscape. It's a lovely texture, an overall smoothness composed of distinct clumpiness. Is this a feature of ...

Still life with lunar eclipses I (Painting) Still life with lunar eclipses I.JPG Based on the progress of Earth's shadow across the Moon's face during a lunar eclipse, I played with superficial representations of such events as columnar stacks of 'slices of time' - a kind of temporal tomography. I ...

http://www.icg.port.ac.uk/2017/01/visua ... -universe/
Also Twitter @TactileUniverse

Here you can read about ICG's 3D printing of astronomical imagery. Asterisms become stippled terrains, galaxies like whirls of sand under the fingertips.

I should have been quicker to notice, that the direction of lighting varies: sometimes from the left, sometimes the right. A lovely portrait, that does things that a simple photograph could not (and that might not occur to an artist to do!).

The ISS travels at about 100x its length per second, yet these photographers manage to snap and freeze the Station as it transits the Moon - and gather enough light to capture the scene! Great kit and craft, and beautiful results.

Honky-tonk Moon (Painting) Honky-tonk Moon.JPG 27 December 2012: from the train near London Waterloo station I sketched the fat Moon rising near the 'Shard' building. The syncopated rhythm of light and dark storeys put me in mind of keyboards and Scott Joplin's rags. (It helped that the building's ...

I could give it a 'whirl' !

I think paintings of women look nice. :D :wink: Hmm... I wouldn't want to strain too hard against the fence marked !OFF TOPIC! lest I be asked to take my quadruple espresso to the forum next door. But... A Gaia-esque personification of fine human science, wisdom, stewardship, love etc, features in ...

Lewis Wolpert once said that "Art has zero to offer Science". http://www.calbuzz.com/wp-content/uploads/alfred_e_neuman-115x150.jpg Art? Is that true? :shock: Ann There's this BBC Radio 4 archive page - alas the 'Listen Again' link didn't work for me. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/t...

Even painting pictures of our own planet's face and landscapes can be tricky! And I really enjoy Chris Peterson's point: it goes to the heart of the difficulties. Turning a few bits of data into something visual, borrowing from our existing 'visual vocabulary' - Earthly or gained via space probes - ...

Bach shell I (Painting) Bach shell I.jpg At Christmastide in 2005, BBC Radio 3 cleared its schedules for a 214-hour, round-the-clock broadcast of the complete works of J.S. Bach. I came to imagine a spherical shell of music, 10 light-days thick, expanding from Earth; but soon refined the vision int...

How will this Safe Mode impact the planned series of orbits?

Home (Painting) Home.jpg Gazing down at Earth, you see Home. But here I imagined the need for a tangible memory of an Earth walked on, touched - to bridge the emotional as well as physical gulf: a scruffy photograph of some summer cottage scene. It was inspired by the demise of the Mir space statio...

Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Harrison Schmitt & Frank Borman appear in a series of short video interviews, talking about their Moon missions. But their voices are a bit croaky, like they've got colds or dry throats, or have just been talking a while. In fact it all seems rather doom-laden. Perha...