Ned Gulley's Blog. Resident buzzwords: wise crowds, accelerated design, swarm robotics, synthetic biology.
Posted in Astronomy on Feb 18th, 2010
Great news! Dan Schroeder, the physics professor whom some of you will remember from his excellent reviews of iPhone astronomy apps, has written his own astronomy applet. Give it a look. Why write another astronomy program? Here’s Dan’s answer. To be useful to most of my students, a simulation program has to be (a) free; [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Jul 28th, 2009
Here’s the setup for a joke: once there was a mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer, and… Oh, wait, that’s not the setup for a joke. That’s a description of my house in grad school. Okay, it was actually a trailer, not a house, but that’s not important. For the purposes of today’s story, what [...]
Posted in Astronomy on May 28th, 2009
Once on a camping trip in Utah, I took a picture of our group late at night. I had a tripod and used a long exposure, but not being a very skilled photographer, I wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out. When the pictures came back from the lab, I was in for [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Apr 8th, 2009
It’s been a big year for anniversaries. First we have Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin blowing out 200 candles apiece (were they jealous of each other?), and now comes a Galileo event at twice that span: 400 years. When you put it that way, it’s interesting to consider that Darwin gets you halfway to Galileo. [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Jan 15th, 2009
Check out these beautiful time lapse movies of the nighttime sky: The Sky in Motion – Movies – Digital Images of the Sky. The quality of the photography is superb, so the movies are like butter. Like dark starry butter smeared all over the sky. Okay, there’s no such thing as dark starry butter, but [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Oct 22nd, 2008
It’s fun to look at pictures of planets taken by our robotic eyeball extenders. We get to see things that are too darn far away to see with even the biggest earthbound telescope. But there’s another kind of treat when we look at our own sun with new eyes from here on earth. We’re used [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Apr 3rd, 2008
Yowza! Check out this panoramic landscape from Mars. It’s from a place called Hebes Chasma. What you’re looking at is a plateau in the middle of a canyon 8000 meters deep. That is to say, this thing would make a dandy bathtub for Mount Everest (8848 m). Mind you, that mountain could use a good [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Nov 16th, 2007
The latest version of Google Earth now has a projection of the sky built into called, fittingly, Google Sky. It’s a natural extension. We’ve got lots of pictures of the starry sky, so why not stick them all together using the Google Earth glue that already exists. But when I tried it for the first [...]
Did you know that the Japanese have a space ship orbiting the Moon right now? Known variously as SELENE or Kaguya, it is, as we speak, floating around the Moon, taking gorgeous high definition video. So much of our mental imagery of the lunar landscape is based on Apollo video from the early 1970s, grainy [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Nov 5th, 2007
I had read that Comet Holmes had brightened dramatically, but I am suspicious of the word “dramatic” when used by astronomers. The events they describe are undoubtedly dramatic, but the images they describe are often tiny smudges even when observed through a big fancy-pants telescope. So I was pleased tonight when I finally had a [...]
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