Science thread - anything interesting?

Hehe. I believe the Landover Baptist Church is satire though. It's scarily close to some real christian sites though, for instance Rapture Ready and Westboro Baptist Church.

Peter

It sure did a Chris Morris on me.

Anyway, yesterday we visited the Omniversum IMAX theatre and saw Dolphins and Hubble.

Dolphins was really nice! It was about the intelligence and communication of dolphins and the images were really nice. This movie fully used the IMAX experience. You can imagine what it looks like swimming underwater with the dolphins and flying above the seas, seeing the dolphins jump and everything. So, both informative and beautiful experience.

Then we saw Hubble. It was about the hubble telescope and the repairs that were done to keep it going after all. Also a mix of documentary about the Hubble and the astronauts and footage of the repairs as well as breathtaking images of galaxies and nebulas and everything in space the Hubble has collected in all those years. Those were the highlights when it comes to IMAX experience and I wonder if they could have used IMAX a bit more on the astronauts part of the movie, like for instance some great views on earth. They were there, but not so many. The only downside for me was calling Earth the perfect planet and the movie ends with the question if we will find a planet somewhere in the universe as perfect as Earth. I really don't like antropocentric views like that. Of course I know what they mean, but after showing and explaining the magnitude and complexity of the universe I wouldn't expect an expression like that.

(Almost as bad as wondering how the planet could be so prefect. Well, because God made it so perfect for us people, of course! )

We had a very nice afternoon and seeing IMAX movies is always breathtakingly impressive.

Not sure where to put this video but it's very eerie and is in total contrast to the dramatic footage of the recent Japanese earthquake and tsunami footage. Taken by someone experiencing the earthquake, when you step back and think about what is happening it reinforces the forces at work during the earthquake:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyagJeFWTcE

I did see see it Tim - as part of the science "double bill" of this and Wonders of The Universe.

Overall, yes it is. The final one last night, "Messengers", was a bit slow. It shouldn't have been as it was about light!

But last week's on the subject of gravity - "Falling" (3/4) - was very interesting indeed. One thing in last week's episode was a moment: the fact that, if the nucleus of an atom was the size of pebble/marble then the cloud of electrons would extend out to a sphere with a radius of 1 km. That helped me visualise how matter could be compressed so much and the matter become so dense in a black hole. Also showed me that we are mostly composed of space.

And he talks about a neutron star that is only 20 km across but the mass of our own sun and is spinning at a rate of 30 times per second. Someone on this Crab pulsar would experience a gravitational pull 100,000,000,000 times that they would feel on Earth which means that if presenter Prof. Brian Cox were to jump from a height of 5-6 feet (difficult to see scale of thing he uses on the TV as his jumping off point - the top of a projection screen) he would hit the ground at a speed of 4,000,000 miles-per-hour!!

You can watch the series on BBC iPlayer.

"One hundred thousand million" was the term used.

Nought to worry you Lee, oxygen thief Katie Price is 100% empty space.

Words fail me.

Most beautiful time-lapse of the night sky and stars i've ever seen.

breathtaking

http://vimeo.com/22439234

Gorgeous!

I also thought "this music sounds like Ludovico Einaudi" half way through, and it turns out I was right by the video description. Yeah me!

Peter

I don't know D, I was up there in the daytime, that's why I said I'd like to spend a few nights up there.

The ISS is going to show in about 15 minutes - at the top of the hour. Roughly in the same place as previously.

Hi Alan (and anyone interested)

Just got an e-mail from the astro club about the space shuttle launch tonight!

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shutt … index.html

It says that 20 min. after launch the shuttle with orange fuel tank is visible with the naked eye. In the Netherlands that would be between 22:07 and 22:10, with the highest point of 30 degrees SSW at 22:09:30.

Then at 22:35 the ISS is visible as well.

You should give it a try if you can! I'm at a wedding party tonight (no, not William and Kate) so I'm not sure if I can go outside at that time.

I see that the shuttle launch has been postponed for 48 hours.

Well, no sooner than May 10th.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shutt … index.html

Two days ago we had a really good view on the ISS passing. Heaven's Above said it would be 34 degrees, but it was much better, I'd say at least 60-70 degrees! Since it had been a while since I had seen it pass, I forgot how bright it was. Much much brighter than a star. We could see it fade into the shade, which was, according to Julian who had the orbit maps open on the internet as well, somewhere in the direction of Mongolia.

To get in the mood I opened the ISS Live stream 15 minutes before. It's fun when they are communicating and some camera views are excellent, you can see the shape of the continents. Or clouds.
I read the crew page to see who was talking.
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/isslivestream.asx