Great Saturn Cassini video

Go out and see the Astronomy Picture of the Day for June 13th. It's an awesome video of the Saturnian system from Cassini. If all the cosmic ray hits, perspective changes (from Cassini's orbital motion), and dust donut hole moves(due to panning, filter changes, and zooms) are original to the raw images, then I salute Chris Abbas. What a great job.

Now compare that to my crappy gif animation I made of Enceladus and Dione near the rings from 5 years ago. http://dwarmstr.blogspot.com/2006/03/saturn-enceladus-and-dione-animation.html

Making Things Talk & Processing projects

I got Making Things Talk as a gift from a great friend of mine and I just ran two of the projects in the "Identification" chapter.

To start off, you install Processing, a free language for visualization. For me the download for Windows was here. It's a slightly different install process than usual; just make a directory like "C:\Program Files\processing-1.2.1" and dump the contents there, and make a shortcut to processing.exe somewhere convenient for you (or you will forget it's installed).

Then in order to do video things you first need to have quicktime installed; if you have iTunes then you've got quicktime. And, finally, you need a VDIG implementation; for Windows it is WinVDIG. Install version 1.01 from here.

The first project was finding a particular color in a webcam image, reading the color, then putting a pointer on that spot.

Hey it works! See the dot on my nose?
The screenshot misses the dynamic aspect of the little dot following you around.



The second project was using your imager to decode QR Codes--and ha ha, check out the sample from the book. Nice one, Tom Igoe.


Great stuff.

P.S. I just loaded the 'slitscan' example from the Processing examples. Ha!

Old Mars photos from 2003: No, it's not going to be big in August.

Inspired by a query regarding the false meme going around about Mars, I took a look at some images I took of Mars during it's big opposition in 2003. That was a great opposition. Here's a couple of those images. The first one is a single image without manipulation, the second and third are Registax processed images from videos, and the last is one of those videos.
Mars at the moment is not approaching one of those awesome 17 year oppositions like 2003 or 1988. It's just fading away from its January opposition and currently visible in Leo in the evening.

Eyjafjallajökull eruption: gorgeous video

The NY Times Lede blog has linked to BBC Channel 4 video of the eruption. From the look of it, the videographer had one of the many excursion drivers take them up Thórsmörk (or Þórsmörk) valley on the north side up high enough to look at the eruption without dealing with the jokulhaup (or glacial flood) in the river. If you have ADD you will miss the active sub-Plinian eruption and great lightning in latter half of the video.

UPDATE: the waterfall at the beginning is Seljalandsfoss. I have a photo of it here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dwarmstr/4532063271/.





EDIT: calling it sub-Plinian.

Can you stand it? Cloud footage running backwards

I'm going to be honest:

I can't stand anyone running cloud video footage in reverse. This drives me crazy; whether it's my physics and chemistry of the atmosphere classes or just my sensibilities but whenever I see it it drives me crazy (c.f. Survivor this season). If the cloud droplets are evaporating or condensing the wrong way, anyone with meteorological experience (or someone who has watched Koyaanisqatsi) will call shenanigans. Convection has a distinct look to it; as well as evaporation; and when producers try to reverse the video it shows.

h

Re: Video of the day, rocket destroys sun dog

Regarding that SDO video, a friend points out another video of the same event:
http://www.spasmsofaccommodation.com/2010/02/sonic-boom-meets-sun-dog.html

Microwave meter videos

I made a few videos of the simple microwave / 2.4GHz meter dealing with work office's microwave oven--woe be unto whomever hangs around the hinge.

The first is a full examination of the space of the microwave oven, and is entirely inappropriate for those with short attention spans (stick to the second video, you).



This one is a short proof the detection is when the microwave oven is busily heating my hot water for tea.



The other amazing news is there is a very strong microwave signal that the northwest corner of the roof of Ryerson intercepts that appears to be coming from either the Admin building or the hospital: it strongly peaks in the southwest direction, almost pegs the meter on the 200mV scale, and when I added a headphone to the meter I could audibly hear some sort of signal that reminded me of a TV video sync noise.
What is this signal? Am I hearing a horizontal sync? Or is there some other signal that has a repetitive sync noise that runs at 12-18 kilohertz?

International Space Station pass -- seen through a telescope

The ISS is the largest artifical satellite orbiting Earth -- with 240ft long solar panels and a 150ft long body, its mass is over 227 tons. Being this big, and orbiting at only a 350km altitude, it can be discerned as a non-pointlike object with a normal sized telescope. If your telescope can keep up, that is. The ISS crosses the sky in about five minutes. It's usually much easier just to enjoy watching it look like a bright star crossing the sky (predictions here: Heavens-Above.com)

Mike Tyrrell followed the ISS in his 10" Meade telescope and made a fantastic video, a three minute pass sped up 8x.

The old Mir space station before its demise appeared as a blazing "T" shape in the Ryerson telescope.