Have you been to the most spectacular tourist attractions in our solar system? If not, here's your chance, compliments of artist Ron Miller and writer Ed Bell at Scientific American. Packing the right clothes for these warm and cold locations won't be easy.
Check out this a wonderful video and commentary regarding the launch of Apollo 11, the first lunar landing. All of this action is captured with a still video camera perched almost unimaginably close to the rocket exhaust. 500 frames per second turned 30 seconds into 8 minutes. This video reminds me about the many ordinary things that had to happen according to plan in order to allow the success of what has to be the one of the most spectacular journeys in the history of humankind. Keep in mind that the Saturn V Rocket was 363 feet tall, only one foot shorter than St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Each one of the F-1 engines (which are still the most powerful rocket engines ever built) were 12 feet in diameter at the nozzle, and there were five of these monsters powering the launch.
Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch (HD) Camera E-8 from Mark Gray on Vimeo.
I have occasionally ruminated our improved ability to see and understand the universe around us. On this blog, it usually is in terms of comparing the Young Earth view with what we've learned in the last few hundred years. Posts such as The Universe is not Specified to Human Scale and My limited vision make the point.
But I've started another blog that focuses less on politics and culture, yet found that one of my first posts again addresses the issue of how we've improved our vision of the world around us in the last few dozen generations. Please peruse The Object At Hand: Light Lens a Hand, to Help us Understand and see if I am off the beam.
Do you know your neighborhood? No, not that neighborhood. I'm asking whether you know the nearby stars. Here's a cool 3D graphic that provides lots of good information about our solar neighbors.
What happens to things that fall into black holes? Here is an admittedly highly speculative head-twisting suggestion published by National Geographic. It offers an explanation "certain features of our universe deviate from what theory predicts, according to physicists." I see that Science has reported on the same theory by the same scientist (BTW, his name is Nikodem Poplawski, and he works at Indiana University in Bloomington).
A long time ago, in a universe much larger than our own, a giant star collapsed. Its implosion crammed so much mass and energy together that it created a wormhole to another universe. And inside this wormhole, our own universe was born. It may seem fantastic, but a theoretical physicist claims that such a scenario could help answer some of the most perplexing questions in cosmology.