Awesome astrophotography from the South Downs | Science | The Guardian
To mark the start of the Dark Skies Festival today, here are some fantastic photographics taken not that far from Brighton.
Link tags: stars
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So your grandmother is a starship now: a quick guide for the bewildered
Useful FAQs.
Your grandmother is not just a starship, she’s a highly individual starship with her own goals and needs!
A Black Cloud of Computation
SETI—the Search for Extra Terrestrial Information processing:
What we get is a computational device surrounding the Asymptotic Giant Branch star that is roughly the size of our Solar System.
The Size of Space
Celestial objects ordered by size, covering a scale from one astronaut to the observable universe.
Figures in the Stars
A lovely bit of data visualisation from Nadieh showing the differences and commonalities in constellations across cultures. As always, she’s written up the process too.
Starability - Accessible rating system demo
Accessible star ratings (progressively enhanced from radio buttons) with lots of animation options. The code is on Github.
Seedship
A thoroughly enjoyable adventure game in your browser. You are the AI of a colony starship. Humanity’s future is in your hands.
Constellation charts
Refresh to get a new randomly generated constellation.
A lovely bit of creative JS from Emily
Hertzsprung-Russell diagram animation | ESA/Hubble
When I was in Düsseldorf for this year’s excellent Beyond Tellerrand conference, I had the pleasure of meeting Nadieh Bremer, data visualisation designer extraordinaire. I asked her a question which is probably the equivalent of asking a chef what their favourite food is: “what’s your favourite piece of data visualisation?”
There are plenty of popular answers to this question—the Minard map, Jon Snow’s cholera map—but we had just been chatting about Nadieh’s previous life in astronomy, so one answer popped immediately to mind: the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.
Discovery of peculiar periodic spectral modulations in a small fraction of solar type stars
We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an ETI signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis.
My latest Twitter bot: @5point9billion (14 Dec., 2015, at Interconnected)
I always loved Matt’s light cone project—it was a big influence on the Radio Free Earth hack that I made with Chloe. Now it has been reborn as a Twitter bot. Here’s Matt’s documentation for his future self:
I haven’t made a habit of project write-ups before, but I’m taking an increasingly “long now” approach to the tech I make and use. How will I remember what I made in a decade? By reading this post.
Our Generation Ships Will Sink / Boing Boing
Kim Stanley Robinson pours cold water on the premise of generation starships for crewed interstellar travel.
The more I hear about Aurora, the more I think I might enjoy reading it.
100,000 Stars
A gorgeous interactive visualisation of our local galactic neighbourhood.
ISS Star Trails - a set on Flickr
Beautiful time-lapse photography from Don “we’ve got a Dragon by the tail” Pettit, taken from the International Space Station.
100 Year Starship Study
Now this looks like a fascinating project …and there’s a symposium happening in Florida at the end of September with Jill Tartar, Stewart Brand and more. I want to go to there.
Stellarium
A free open source planetarium for your computer.
Code: Flickr Developer Blog » Found in space
The “blind astrometry server” is a program which monitors the Astrometry group on Flickr, looking for new photos of the night sky. It then analyzes each photo, and from the unique star positions shown it figures out what part of the sky was photographed and what interesting planets, galaxies or nebulae are contained within.
Don't Fuck With Love by The Sad Little Stars
A beautifully shot pop-up book style video.