Showing posts with label astronomy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label astronomy. Show all posts
2009 -- Putting things into perspective
earth only from 6 light-hours away[i-earth only from 6 light-hours away]
A photograph taken by Voyager 1, at a distance of 4 billion miles, (only) about 6 light-hours, from Earth. Our planet is the tiny pale speck, in the top center of the picture. You have to look carefully to see it.
Astronomer Carl Sagan put things into perspective about "our tiny pale speck":
"That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." (Full)Happy New Year to all of you. Let's hope 2009 will bring a bit of peace, prosperity and happiness to each one living on this tiny blue speck.
a view on our tiny dot - click for hires[i-a view on our tiny dot - click for hires]
Picture courtesy NASA Read the full post...
Picks of the week: Hubble, GigaPan and The Hungersite
deep space[i-deep space]
Here are the interesting links I harvested this week:
- Boston.com shows some of the amazing pictures from the Hubble telescope. Like the one above: the Hubble Ultra Deep Field: Astronomers pointed Hubble at a tiny, relatively empty part of our sky (only a few stars from the Milky Way visible), and created an exposure nearly 12 days long over a four-month period. They found thousands of galaxies ranging from 1 to 13 billion light-years away from Earth. Each galaxy is a home to billions of stars.
- The Enough Project is helping to build a permanent constituency to prevent genocide and crimes against humanity.
- AndFunForAll features many bitter-sweet random pictures collected from here, there and everywhere.
- The HungerSite allows you to "donate with a click" for their causes: hunger, breast cancer, children's health, the rainforest, literacy and animal shelters.
- And last but not least: Gigapan is a project supported by a team at Carnegie Mellon University, promoting a camera robot. The unit, which can be used with almost any digital camera, costs just under $300, but the “stitching” software that creates the signature zoom & pan panoramas, is free. The result are megapictures where you can zoom up to incredible details. Have a look and get hooked. (discovered via Janet from TrackerNews)
Picture courtesy Boston.com Read the full post...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)