Falling Leaves: the Ardes blog

Archives filed under "astronomy"

Riding Light

Ray Drainville

TL;DR: Warp 1 sucks.

On Earth, the speed of light seems incredibly quick. It’s actually quite slow in the larger scheme of things. This video has you travel with a photon in real time to each planet until you get to Jupiter. I dare you to get to Mercury, the innermost planet to the Sun, before you start skipping ahead.

I think the accompanying soundtrack does a splendid job setting you up for an exciting journey, but this urgency is wonderfully undermined by reality.

Perfect animation

Ray Drainville

Unknown Pleasures: fantastic album, fantastic graphic design work by Peter Saville. It turns out it makes for a fantastic animated GIF as well from the Imaginary Foundation.

For those of you who don’t know, that image is a record of the signal for the first pulsar ever discovered. Pulsars emit regular bursts of radiation as they rotate rapidly, so it was initially thought to be evidence of extraterrestrial existence. It was nicknamed ‘LGM-1’ (for ‘Little Green Men’).

Devour

Ray Drainville

Old frying pans photographed to resemble planets. The series is called “Devour”. Wonderful: