Monday, August 04, 2014

SOME RECENTLY POSTED ASTRONOMY PICTURES

Above, the Horsehead Nebula as seen recently by The Hubble space telescope. Actually, it's a composite of several pictures taken at different wavelengths.


For comparrison, here's the same nebula as it appeared in the years before we had The Hubble. A big difference, eh?



 Here's (above) a fragment of a recent episode of "Through the Wormhole." It makes the amazing claim that gravity may not exist. If it does exist then where are the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein? An elaborate, well-funded search just concluded and it turned up nothing. According to this show what we call gravity might just be the same thing as the Strong Force operating through gluon pairs rather than individual gluons.

That's an amazing thing to say. In order to explain why gravity is so weak compared to other forces, we've come up with other dimensions, endless bubble universes, and M Theory. What if none of that was necessary to explain what we see? The demotion of gravity from force to something less would simplify things and overturn a lot of currently believed ideas. Who's right?


Above, a picture of gigantic spouting water ice geysers on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. It took a while to figure out that the water was coming from within the world and not from canyons on the moon's surface. Now it's widely believed that there is indeed a liquid ocean under the surface, and comparisons are being made to Jupiter's watery moon, Europa. Could this world be a candidate for life?


Don't get me wrong...there's no evidence that Earth life began there. It's all fun speculation. It's easy to imagine the early Solar System where ejecta from impacts brought about an exchange of materials between planets and moons. Maybe life began on Earth and was transferred to Europa or Enceladus.

That's Earth above, as it's thought to have looked 4 billion years ago in it's "Hadeon" period. I'm guessing that Hadeon is derived from "Hades."


Another picture of The Milky Way.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey Eddie. I know this is off topic but even though I love working and drawing directly in Illustrator and being able to do clean up and coloring in Photoshop, I wonder if there are any other good drawing programs for Mac I can use. I also have ArtRage on my machine.

Sometimes when I do drawings in Illustrator, the line work disappears for no reason and it's just annoying having to get those lines to reappear again.

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Anon: I wish I had more experience with this. Autodesk's Sketchbook Pro is used by a lot of people. On ipad I use ProCreate, Paper by 53, Sketches and Adobe ideas...all four. I never used the ipad program called Brushes which had a good reputation years ago, but which is now hardly mentioned.

My guess is that John uses ToonBoom for sketching because he likes the brushes. Flash is reputed to have good brushes and the later versions of Photoshop (CS5 and later) are said to have good ones.

Sometimes specialty brushes that aren't generally used for sketching can make a funny line when the settings are adjusted.

Unknown said...

Alright. I think I kinda figured out what was going with the lines cause when I decided to make a different, bigger template, that problem suddenly disappeared but thanks nonetheless.

It was a trial and error process figuring out what lines in Illustrator work best and adjusting the calligraphic brush settings for me and ones I could get the best possible thick and thin lines out of but once I was able to do that, I quickly got used to drawing with a Wacom tablet for the most part. I'll definitely look into playing around with Flash since I have Creative Cloud and everything.