Those that know me know I have look at those NASA photos. Well I did today and the first one I looked at had a big structure in the far lower right hand corner. I'm sure there are people that look at this and can't see anything. Those are the same people who walk into the museum and can't tell the difference in the brush stroke technique used from one painting to the other. It's just not their thing, but its mine.
This is by no means the only structure in the photo, there are loads but most are not in focus enough to bother to talk about or report, but I did add a few at the end of the video that may spark your interest. The link for the moon photo is below. SCW
So I was browsing around and bumped into this little gem of a website from Time Magazine. It shows 30 years of Landsat images from around the world. All of them stitched together...
Water almost never looks quite like water when it's rendered: there a lot of variables involved with a fluid splashing around, after all. But this virtual water looks pretty great.
The team at PhysXInfo made the software, called Position Based Fluids, that you see here. The simulation is running in real-time on a cheap graphics card, which makes the realistic flow of water impressive on its own. But the real treat is the aquarium-breaking at the end of the video, which must be complicated to simulate. It's enough to get gamers or special effects hounds salivating.
Check out PhysXInfo if you're interested in the technical details.
And another one helps you see just how far it is to Mars.
From nanoparticles to galaxies, we can understand a lot about how our universe works--but it's hard to keep things in context. Can you really grasp how far you'd have to travel to reach Mars? Or wrap your head around the infinitesimally small size of a virus?
A couple of awesome animations will help. The first one, from London-based designers David Paliwoda and Jesse Williams, is an effective way to see just how far away Mars really is. It's shrunk down to a 100-pixel scale. Click here to open the animation.
When you've got Mars down, look at this incredible Flash tool created by Cary and Michael Hwang. It's from last year, and it's the second version of their "Scale of the Universe" animation, but having recently stumbled across it we found it well worth sharing.
You can scroll with a mouse or touchscreen, but I recommend using the slider at the bottom, because then you won't miss any of the lovely animated gifs--from wriggling worms to pulsating Cepheid stars. Click here to open it and enter the Scale of the Universe.
