Even better

Even better than the last post, this one. It puts the Phoenix and parachute image in a bit of context. In this case, Heimdall Crater

To understand what’s going on, look at the box at the bottom left. It’s the magnified portion from the middle left part of the crater. On the larger photo, all you see is a speck of white, but that’s Phoenix

Click on the image to see it in full resolution.

It looks like Phoenix is headed for Heimdall, but really, it’s 20 km in front (towards the camera) of it. For a sense of scale, Hiemdall itself is ten km across, and the lander is 12 km above the surface. It just looks like it’s falling into the crater.

A little thing called parallax.

Powers of ten

Multiply by ten.

Start ten million light years from the Milky Way, which is our home galaxy (and which is itself 100 000 light years in diameter). It is but a splotch in the visible universe. But when you zoom in by a factor of ten times, you can see better, and the spiral arms become visible. Zoom in again, and all of the sudden you’re in our neighbourhood, the eastern spiral arm.

Each click brings you ten times closer to Earth. But then what? Click and find out.

It’s a java powered animation that brings you from the verge of our galaxy to deep inside teh cell of a leaf, magnifying by ten times each step.

Astronomy This’n'that

A few things astronomical have been hitting the news and the blogs lately. If you are interested in this kind of thing (because, like, you might be taking an astronomy course, after all…) feel free to click.

(It’s free!)

Astronomers find the smallest black hole (courtesy: the Universe Today)

Black holes seem to have no upper limit; some weigh in at hundreds of millions of times the mass of the Sun. But how small can they be? Astronomers have discovered what they think is the least massive black hole ever seen, with a mere 3.8 times the mass of the Sun, and a diameter of only 25 km (15 miles) across.

Saturn’s rings: now you see them, soon you won’t (courtesy: Astronomy Today)

What first comes to mind when you hear the name Saturn? Rings, right? If the rings are what you want to view, you should do it soon. In September of next year you won’t see them, at least for awhile.

Astronomers find baby planet (courtesy: Scienceblog)

Scottish astronomers have found a baby planet still in the stages of forming and encased within a ‘womb’ of gas.

The finding provides a unique view of how planets take shape, because the supporting images also shows the womb-like parent disk material from which the new planet formed. The ‘protoplanet’, called HL Tau b after its parent star HL Tau, could be as young as a few hundred years old.