View From the ISS by Knate Myers

Maybe you've seen already this recently released video by Knate Myers on Vimeo. He took photo footage shot by the astronauts on the International Space Station and set it to the music of John Murphy's Adagio in D Minor, the soundtrack of the movie, Sunshine.

The imagery is mind-blowing. Anything I might say about it would be a cliche. For best enjoyment, watch it in full-screen mode using the HTML5 video rather than the Flash video. At least on my machine, it played smoother. Enjoy!

View from the ISS at Night from Knate Myers on Vimeo.

Pale Blue Dot Revisited

Earth is barely visible as
a pale blue dot in the  red
band on the right.

I love Carl Sagan. He was as much a poet as he was an astronomer.  Back in 1994, he published a book  entitled, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. These are the opening words to his book:

The spacecraft was a long way from home, beyond the orbit of the outermost planet and high above the ecliptic plane - which is an imaginary flat surface that we can think of as something like a racetrack in which the orbits of the planets are mainly confined. The ship was speeding away from the sun at 40,000 miles per hour. But in early February 1990, it was overtaken by an urgent message from Earth. 

Obediently, it turned its cameras back toward the now-distant planets. Slewing its scan platform from one spot in the sky to another, it snapped 60 pictures and stored them in digital form on its tape recorder.  Then slowly, in March, April, and May,  it radioed the data back to earth. Each image was composed of 640,000 individual picture elements ("pixels"), like the dots in a newspaper wirephoto or a pointillist painting.  The spacecraft was 3.7 billion miles away from Earth, so far away that it took each pixel 5 1/2 hours, traveling at the speed of light, to reach us. 

What the pictures showed was the Earth - just a pale blue dot in the black of the universe.  Sagan's words have become the inspiration for many, including artists and filmmakers.  I highlighted one such artist/filmmaker in an early post on the Symphony of Science. Recently, I came across another video on Vimeo by Michael Marantz using Sagan's words. Sagan himself provides the narration. Marantz shot the time-lapse images and composed and performed the music. I thought it might be worth sharing here. In these troubled and troubling times, a little perspective is useful.  Hope you enjoy.


EARTH: The Pale Blue Dot from Michael Marantz on Vimeo.

Kudos to one of my favorite sites, Open Culture, for suggesting the idea for this blog.

Sean Carroll and the Arrow of Time

Sean Carroll is a cosmologist at CalTech. He is also a gifted teacher.  I became aware of Carroll when my wife and I ordered a lecture series by him from the Teaching Company.  His course was entitled, Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The Dark Side of the Universe.  In the 24 lectures of this course, Carroll explains why the "stuff" we can see in the universe is only five percent of what is thought to be there.  Twenty-five percent is Dark Matter, needed to explain gravitational effects, and seventy percent is Dark Energy, needed to explain the perpetual expansion of the universe.  I would recommend the course. Even though it is taught using layman's language, it is very detailed.

Carroll prepared that course in 2007.  Since that time, he has written a new book called From Eternity to Here: the Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time.  This book attempts to explain why time goes in only one direction.  "Well", you say.  "Duh?"  But it is not so obvious why time goes in one direction.  The fundamental laws of physics work with time going in either direction.  How can it be that we only get older?  Turns out, entropy has a whole lot to do with it.  Entropy is a measure of disorder and it can only get bigger.  Entropy explains why eggs turn into omelets but not the other way around.

You can see Carroll in action (and for free!) in a two-part video lecture he gave at the University of Sydney in December of last year.  Part One is here and you can see the link for Part Two on the right of that page. Each video lasts 30 minutes. If you like what you see, you can order his book from this link at Amazon or you can read the blog, Cosmic Variance, to which he contributes at Discover Magazine.  He also has his own website. Enjoy.

Our Amazing and Expanding Universe

I am a fan of Open Culture, a blog on all things about learning out of Stanford University.  Yesterday's post was entitled 10,000 Galaxies in 3D and it is an amazing video that is well worth watching.  I encourage you to click over to Open Culture but I have provided the video below if you prefer to see it here.



The video is a terrific look at the Hubble Telescope's Ultra Deep Field Project.  The power of Hubble is truly staggering.  And to think Hubble would have been rendered much less useful if it hadn't been repaired by the Space Shuttle astronauts four times over the years (the last time less than a year ago).  This is a great example of why it is important to keep moving forward with manned space flight.

Open Culture picked up the 10,000 Galaxies' video from the very interesting astronomy website, DeepAstronomy.  This is also worth a look if you have any interest in the night sky.

All of this reminded me of one of my favorite Monty Python songs, The Galaxy.  I found a version of the song on YouTube.  The cleverness of the song is at least partly how well Eric Idle incorporates the science of cosmology into the song.  Give it a listen.