Should have switched to warp 1.
If the Earth were 100 pixels wide
91–100 of 216 posts
Re: If the Earth were 100 pixels wide
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's get to the bottom of this. It is a panning motion, this much is physically, visually true. Does it still make sense to talk about 'speed of motion'? Now I'm confused. What happens when you pan from the moon to the sun (during a new moon, when they're ostensibly both visible)? If you do it quite quickly you are panning faster than the speed of light? (In the interpretatio: 'if a physical object remained at the c…
Any comparison to the speed of light immediately invokes other concepts that wouldn't apply to panning, so it's probably a bad idea. There might be situations where it makes sense to map an angular speed to some sort of absolute speed, but it just doesn't work in this particular example.
The specific situation where it makes sense to map an angular speed to some sort of absolute speed is if you're told - or have some way of figuring out or knowing - the distance of the camera to the two objects (including if it is very highly zoomed, which it obviously is, from the perspective we are shown).
in this sense - if there is an intuitive sense of the distance of the camera and the high level of zoom - it makes sense to speak of an object leaving earth at the velocity that lets it stay in the center of the frame as we pan.
doesn't it?
Re: If the Earth were 100 pixels wide
#93Perhaps this is relevant: Opera's rendering glitches mean that we cannot go to Mars with the latest version of Opera on Windows.
Re: If the Earth were 100 pixels wide
#94Oh this is fantastic! My father teaches astronomy to kids (he has a mobile planetarium that he takes around schools [1]) and one of the main pain points he has mentioned is communicating a sense of scale to them. This is elegant because it mixes the concept of "imagine this orange is the earth, mars would be in " within the constraints of a web page. Kids have difficulty visualising distances in an abstract way - but…
That is super cool! Can you please ask him to put some larger images on there because I only get these tiny little thumbs.
Re: If the Earth were 100 pixels wide
#95Here is a photo of the Earth and Moon, with the to-scale distance between them. It makes a great desktop background: http://www.traipse.com/earth_and_moon/
This is really cool, though I would like to see a version in higher resolution with some stars. Not oppressively bright stars, just a hint to remind you that there are billions of billions of violent, fiery balls of self-contained exploding gas out there...
If it was a real photograph, I do not think you would see any stars in the frame. The Earth is extremely bright compared to the stars. If the exposure of the film/video (or your eyes) was set to portray the Earth at that brightness, you wouldn't see any stars.
Example: http://www.astrobio.net/images/galleryimages_images/Gallery_... This is a real image and is not CG.
Another one: http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/images/ISD/highres/AS17/AS17-1...
Re: If the Earth were 100 pixels wide
#96One thing that's always gotten to me about this distance is what it means for communication latency. Mars is 20 light-minutes away. If we sent colonists, communication would be a 40-minute round trip. No phone calls home, no way to have a chat with friends or loved ones; at best they could send a message, and wait 40 minutes for a reply. That's far away.
Like foreign country few hundreds revolutions of our planet around the Sun ago.
Good point. We have so forgotten how bad it used to be, that 40 mins seems so long. Kings weren't able to talk to their ambassadors in 30 mins, not that very long ago.
Re: If the Earth were 100 pixels wide
#97Perhaps this is relevant: Opera's rendering glitches mean that we cannot go to Mars with the latest version of Opera on Windows.
Mostly worked for me in Opera 12.14 on WinXP. The first click showed white space instead of stars, but then the second click (after the moon) showed the scrolling starfield the whole way.
Re: If the Earth were 100 pixels wide
#98Why not?
(function () {
var d=1;
setInterval(function () {
$('#Earth-Illustration').css({'webkit-transform':
'rotate(' + ((d>36) ? d=2 : d++)*10 + 'deg)'})},100);
}());
Re: If the Earth were 100 pixels wide
#99"At the current state of space technology, it will take at least 240 days to get to Mars"
Uh, no. The person who put this together obviously hasn't read a lot about proposed plans for Mars missions or even understands how transfer orbits work. 150 days is a likely practical limit for today's technology, but it's not a hard limit. Spend a little more fuel, and you could make it 149 days.
http://www.universetoday.com/14841/how-long-does-it-take-to-...
Re: If the Earth were 100 pixels wide
#100Is anyone else a little bothered by the fact that the reported speed was 1/5 the speed of light, yet the flyby necessarily increased to well over the speed of light in order to actually get you to Mars before you got bored and closed the tab? Traveling at the speed of light would have taken 5-20 minutes. Traveling slower than that would have taken even longer...
I'm more bothered by the authoritative fact that 'the timeline for a manned mission to Mars is the 2030s'. Says who, NASA?
They're not the only ones trying to get there.