标签: moon

I think it's fair to say that my wife (Gina The Georgeous) is not a huge fan of science fiction. I'm sure I've heard her mutter the phrase "mindless drivel" under her breath on more than one occasion.   Gina thinks I'm incredibly clever because I know all sorts of "stuff" that she doesn't (and vice versa, of course). She uses me as her "go-to" resource whenever she has a question pertaining to science or technology. Paradoxically, a lot of what I know I learned from reading science fiction.   As a case in point, just the other day Gina received a communication from our local weather man. I'm not sure if this was via Facebook, or Twitter, or maybe they are just close friends. The thrust of this message was an amazing picture showing the dark (back) side of the moon passing across the face of the earth.   NASA captures an illuminated view of the dark side of the moon passing the face of the Earth (Photo: NASA/NOAA).   The accompanying text noted that this picture was taken by NASA's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) camera, which is flying aboard a space weather monitoring satellite called the lying aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR). The note went on to say that this little scamp is a million miles away orbiting at the L1 Lagrange Point.   Not surprisingly, Gina was interested to know what a Lagrange Point was. I think I first learned about this in Space Cadet by Robert Heinlein. The Lagrange Points are positions where the gravitational pull of two large masses precisely equals the centripetal force required for a small object to move with them. In fact there are five such points, called L1 through L5, in the Sun-Earth system.     I also ran across this very cool animation . When I saw this described as an animation, my knee-jerk reaction was that it was artificially generated. In fact, it's a series of real photographs that have been collected together to provide some semblance of motion.   Speaking of the dark side of the moon, as I've mentioned on previous occasions, I saw Pink Floyd play their Dark Side of the Moon live at an open air concert at Knebworth in 1975 .   And, speaking of photographs, have you been looking at the incredible images of Pluto coming from the New Horizons space probe?   Four images from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with color data from the Ralph instrument to create this enhanced color global view of Pluto (Photo: NASA).   By some strange quirk of fate, a few days ago I was chatting to the guy who designed the imaging sensor that was used to take these photographs. What do you think of the incredible "dark side of the moon" images discussed above?

Last week, I've spent my evenings looking at the moon while walking around our neighbourhood with my wife ( Gina The Gorgeous ). The more you look at the moon, the more there is to see, and the more your mind turns to philosophical musings and meditations. There are, of course, a humongous number of moon-related quotes. Two of my favourites are as follows (I'd love to hear the ones that stir you): "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon. July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind." – Neil Armstrong "There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls." – George Carlin Both of these quotes send shivers down my spine, but that's not what I wanted to tell you about. I've convinced myself that you've been "champing at the bit," desperate to hear about the status of my ongoing hobby project to create a massive mosaic of Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night .   Well, one significant element to this piece is the moon in the upper-right-hand corner. Since this picture was largely a study in blue and yellow, Vincent decided to paint the moon as a yellow crescent (it's the crescent shape that tells us it's the moon ... that and the fact we're looking at a night sky, of course). In my case, however, I've decided to go for something different. First of all, I'm not going to have the village in the foreground at the lower-right-hand side. I'm envisaging my piece as reflecting the night sky as seen by early humans say 10,000 years ago. Also, one of the things I always associate with the moon is the "man in the moon" – the face my dear old dad guided me to see when I was a little lad. So I've decided that my mosaic will feature a full moon. I've also decided that I'm actually going to create this element as a single piece, because – the thing is – I want to have a face in the moon. Nothing brazen, you understand. I may not be an artist, but even I know that a great big smiley phiz boasting a cheesy grin would not achieve quite the effect I'm hoping for. I want something much more subtle. This is why I've been spending so much time looking at the real moon, observing the delicate differences between the various grey hues.   The problem is that, as I say, I'm not an artist ("I R an engineer"), so this was something of a poser for me. What would you do if you were faced (pun intended) with this problem? Well, I was chatting with my graphic artist chum Bruce, who hangs out in the office next to mine, explaining what I was trying to do. I was thinking of taking a photograph of someone and somehow manipulating it in Paint.net to give me the effect I was looking for. In turn, Bruce noted that Winston Churchill had a round moon-like visage and a commanding presence. As soon as Bruce said this, I could see it in my "mind's eye." I immediately bounced back into my office and had a quick Google (it's OK, no one was looking). There are, of course, myriad pictures of the great man, but my eyes immediately honed in on one where his face is partially shadowed and he's looking slightly down and to the left (from my perspective).   I copied this picture into Paint.net and set the contrast to 100%, which serves to divide the picture into black and white as illustrated below (there are probably a lot better ways to do this, but I'm not an expert here).   The next step was to zoom in on the face, and to set a circular cropping region as shown below. As you can see, this is a low-resolution image I'm working with, but it will more than serve my purposes. The real trick at this point in the game was to restrain myself from making the crop area too big. Once again, I don't want my "man in the moon" face to look like a photograph – I want it to be much more subtle than that. I want people to be looking at my mosaic and sort of squinting their eyes and saying "You know, that almost looks like a face..."   Even at this stage, I found it hard (as a non-artist) to really visualise how this was going to turn out, but the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing has never stopped me before, so I pressed on regardless. Once I'd implemented the crop, I pasted the resulting image into Visio:   You must admit that just the act of cutting away the surrounding parts of the image make it a lot easier to see where we're going. Finally, for the moment, I placed a white layer over the image and set the transparency of this layer to only 10%, resulting in the following:   Now, imagine this as a 5-inch (convert to mm except for displays) diameter moon in the upper-right-hand corner of my mosaic. What you can make out of the face is stern, and it's looking down on the scene in just the right way. The next step is to replicate the light and dark areas using two glazes on my ceramic tile (I'm sure this will "fuzzify" the image even further). I'm going to be experimenting with glazes and my kiln this coming weekend – after which I will take a stab at creating my "man in the moon." Generating the final product might take a few attempts and a couple of weeks' work (just for the moon, the entire mosaic is going to take months). Am I boring you with all of this, or would you be interested in seeing photographs of my moon when it's finished?

I've spent evenings of the last week looking at the moon while walking around our neighbourhood with my wife ( Gina The Gorgeous ). The more you look at the moon, the more there is to see, and the more your mind turns to philosophical musings and meditations. There are, of course, a humongous number of moon-related quotes. Two of my favourites are as follows (I'd love to hear the ones that stir you): "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon. July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind." – Neil Armstrong "There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls." – George Carlin Both of these quotes send shivers down my spine, but that's not what I wanted to tell you about. I've convinced myself that you've been "champing at the bit," desperate to hear about the status of my ongoing hobby project to create a massive mosaic of Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night .   Well, one significant element to this piece is the moon in the upper-right-hand corner. Since this picture was largely a study in blue and yellow, Vincent decided to paint the moon as a yellow crescent (it's the crescent shape that tells us it's the moon ... that and the fact we're looking at a night sky, of course). In my case, however, I've decided to go for something different. First of all, I'm not going to have the village in the foreground at the lower-right-hand side. I'm envisaging my piece as reflecting the night sky as seen by early humans say 10,000 years ago. Also, one of the things I always associate with the moon is the "man in the moon" – the face my dear old dad guided me to see when I was a little lad. So I've decided that my mosaic will feature a full moon. I've also decided that I'm actually going to create this element as a single piece, because – the thing is – I want to have a face in the moon. Nothing brazen, you understand. I may not be an artist, but even I know that a great big smiley phiz boasting a cheesy grin would not achieve quite the effect I'm hoping for. I want something much more subtle. This is why I've been spending so much time looking at the real moon, observing the delicate differences between the various grey hues.   The problem is that, as I say, I'm not an artist ("I R an engineer"), so this was something of a poser for me. What would you do if you were faced (pun intended) with this problem? Well, I was chatting with my graphic artist chum Bruce, who hangs out in the office next to mine, explaining what I was trying to do. I was thinking of taking a photograph of someone and somehow manipulating it in Paint.net to give me the effect I was looking for. In turn, Bruce noted that Winston Churchill had a round moon-like visage and a commanding presence. As soon as Bruce said this, I could see it in my "mind's eye." I immediately bounced back into my office and had a quick Google (it's OK, no one was looking). There are, of course, myriad pictures of the great man, but my eyes immediately honed in on one where his face is partially shadowed and he's looking slightly down and to the left (from my perspective).   I copied this picture into Paint.net and set the contrast to 100%, which serves to divide the picture into black and white as illustrated below (there are probably a lot better ways to do this, but I'm not an expert here).   The next step was to zoom in on the face, and to set a circular cropping region as shown below. As you can see, this is a low-resolution image I'm working with, but it will more than serve my purposes. The real trick at this point in the game was to restrain myself from making the crop area too big. Once again, I don't want my "man in the moon" face to look like a photograph – I want it to be much more subtle than that. I want people to be looking at my mosaic and sort of squinting their eyes and saying "You know, that almost looks like a face..."   Even at this stage, I found it hard (as a non-artist) to really visualise how this was going to turn out, but the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing has never stopped me before, so I pressed on regardless. Once I'd implemented the crop, I pasted the resulting image into Visio:   You must admit that just the act of cutting away the surrounding parts of the image make it a lot easier to see where we're going. Finally, for the moment, I placed a white layer over the image and set the transparency of this layer to only 10%, resulting in the following:   Now, imagine this as a 5-inch (convert to mm except for displays) diameter moon in the upper-right-hand corner of my mosaic. What you can make out of the face is stern, and it's looking down on the scene in just the right way. The next step is to replicate the light and dark areas using two glazes on my ceramic tile (I'm sure this will "fuzzify" the image even further). I'm going to be experimenting with glazes and my kiln this coming weekend – after which I will take a stab at creating my "man in the moon." Generating the final product might take a few attempts and a couple of weeks' work (just for the moon, the entire mosaic is going to take months). Am I boring you with all of this, or would you be interested in seeing photographs of my moon when it's finished?  

Well, many interesting news items came out recently, from new rockets to strange exoplanets to the possibility that some things may go faster than the speed of light... Do you recall my recent blog in which – amongst other things – I mentioned the discovery of a planet formed from diamond? ( Click here to see that blog). Well, the last couple of weeks have seen a flurry of articles with regard to the discovery of a solar system involving a single planet (as far as we know) with two suns. Most of these articles have Star Wars in the title, such as the one on the Time.com site: Scientists Find a Star Wars World: One Planet, Two Suns . This is prompted by the fact that there's a famous scene of Luke Skywalker's home world, Tatooine , showing two suns low in the sky. The thing is that although double-star systems are very common, it was not known whether planets could form and survive in such a system. As the article in Time so nicely puts it: "When two elephants are waltzing, it could be very difficult for mice to tiptoe safely under their feet." I personally find this to be tremendously exciting – every day we find new ways in which the universe is even more amazing and incredible than we ever imagined. (If you are interested in this stuff, you might also want to check out the article 10 Remarkable Exoplanets on the HowStuffWorks.com site.) I was also absolutely delighted to hear that NASA has plans to develop a new heavy-lift launch vehicle that is planned to be operational by 2017 – it's inconceivable to me that the first (and only) nation to put a man on the moon would devolve to the state of not even being able to put a man in orbit around the Earth ( Click here for more details). I only hope I live to see a base on the moon following the discovery of water ice at the moon's North Pole ( Click here for more details). And I would LOVE to see videos of explorations of the underground tunnels they've discovered on the moon ( Click here for more details). And as for things going faster than the speed of light... check out my next blog...