How the Earth and Sun really move
I’ve explained this to classes, back when I taught. It’s really neat to see!
This takes about 5 minutes to view, but it's really neat.
by CJ | Mar 2, 2013 | Journal | 25 comments
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While it is quite interesting, like Banichi I fail to see its relevance. Also, as Einstein shows in his little book on relativity, the frame of reference was picked to show the result.
What is shows is the typical passage of a star through the galaxy, which is what creates the arms; and the typical passage of planets about said star, using ours as an example. Which is why slingshotting to boost speed of our outer system probes is such a neat trick.
Very cool!
I really love being able to visualize things so far outside my ability to directly perceive them.
Is it my imagination, or is the galaxy turning towards the more scattered, or ‘trailing’ edges? It would seem to me that, if that is so, it is gathering up star systems as it spins.
Totally OTW, this video makes me glad that I don’t have super curly hair.
Well, here’s one for you. Go back to the first season, maybe two, of Star Trek Next Generation and watch the title/opening sequence very carefully. It shows something they weren’t expecting anybody to notice. What is it, and what does it mean? 🙂
Aside from, Gene liked pretty young women in short skirts, and the networks liked bright colors and blinking lights? Heheheh. — (No, I’m not trying to be serious, there.) — I’m sure I’ve seen those opening credits hundreds of times, but hmm, can’t think of anything particular offhand.
Let’s see…. Enterprise-D does this odd rubber-band-snap elongation thing when it goes to warp.
Special logo font for the series and some titles. Crillee Bold Italic for other titles. (Hey, job hazard, I know these things.) Handel Gothic and the special movie Trek font based on ITC Serif Gothic, revised bolder for DS9 and VOY.
Asteroids, planet flybys, Enterprise-D going hither and yon much like the original ship….
I dunno, can’t think of it off the top of my head.
Back to Gene’s preference for pretty women in revealing costumes. … Occasionally matched by handsome men going shirtless. (Not that Gene preferred that, but the ladies in the audience did….)
Oh no, you have to look carefully at it, memory won’t serve! I didn’t notice until the third or fourth season, after they had replaced the title sequence and I saw it on the reruns! 😉
Heh. Here’s a hint: “Grand Tour” 😀
The site CJ linked to seems to have swapped out its video for the next installment on the author’s project list. Right now it’s something about a tower collapsing.
There’s a copy on youtube, hopefully the link will be a bit more stable…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4V-ooITrws&feature=share
So you think you found it, eh? 😉 I won’t ask now, to let anybody else who wants the fun of discovery to have the chance, but later…
I can see how “Grand Tour” could be a good clue, yes. Oh, look at the clock! Gotta run.
ST-NG Title sequence puzzle answer.
So here’s the scene as I remember it: From a position beyond the Earth-Moon system in the background, Enterprize is on the right, pointed outbound. Earth and moon in “full” phase are on the left. Enterprize begins to rapidly accelerate towards us, outbound. Yahoo!
That’s the way it appears. Zooming away! No, wait. Rewind and watch the moon! As Enterprize accelerates, so does the moon and at the end of the sequence it’s in “third quarter” phase. That takes 7 days and constant angular velocity, even in the 23rd Century! Got a nice scientifically correct representation but the bosses think it’s too slow? Want Enterprize to zoom away more impressively? Just twiddle your clock. 🙂 But don’t SHOW your clock! 😉
The video has a corkscrew within a corkscrew aspect to it. Presumably, all other stars are doing much the same.
Pilots, nav, and scan techs must have to pay close attention with multiple projection cones for ships in a system. Add in all the system objects moving in predictable orbits, quite a lot to follow, but a whole lot of empty space in between… except in asteroid belts and planetary rings. Probably want to be good and sober when you’re sitting scan.
If you think about it, there’s a reason planets trail like a ballerina’s skirts instead of going sideways.
It’s pretty exciting, our little Voyager out there mapping the heliopause; I’d like to know whether it’s proceeding rimward or coreward or up/down, or whether there’s any thought now of launching one in a different direction…
ISTR one is going “out of plane”.
A OT side note: bought deliberations from CC. Primary complaint: left me wanting more!
More is at hand. THere’s another short story. I’ll be posting it this spring.
For me, it finally made me viscerally realise the complexities involved in interplanetary and interstellar navigation. My grasp of mathematics and spatial relationships, even arithmetic, is rather wobbly – I have to see thing before I can understand. With all those stars out there looking nicely fixed compared to us on earth, I could know that we’re al whizzing around at gigantic speeds in many directions at once and still not really realise the complexities involved. One good animation video really is worth a thousand words and lots of explanations!
By the way, the link at the top of this page leads to the creator’s home page, where the video has changed, but in his right-hand column are the links to the vortex-videos 1 and 2.
Good. THank you. THere are astronomers on line now criticising the model for the planetary angle, but hey, once somebody does the rough sketch, now the crowd gathers and starts yelling out corrections and fine points—which means the next model is going to be even better. In all cases, however, the model is a lot more than just drawing circles around the sun on flat paper. 3-d navigation of the universe shows us so many things. I had a stellar one once, many OS’es ago, (Pre-even-MSDos] that let you watch the constellations warp as you moved.
Just wait—someday they’ll have a graphic that includes the asteroid belt, to persuade us all we need to keep an eye out for stragglers.
” A newly discovered asteroid the size of a football field will cruise through Earth’s neighborhood this weekend, just days after another space rock made an even closer approach to our planet. The 330-foot-wide (100 meters) asteroid 2013 ET will miss Earth by 600,000 miles (960,000 kilometers) when it zips by on Saturday (March 9).”
The “2013” in their names means they were only discovered this year, and not long ago either.
This link has helpful text and illustrations to improve the visualization of the solar system’s trip around the milky way.
“No, Our Solar System is NOT a “Vortex”” http://tinyurl.com/bnk3kus
Phil Plait admits DJ Sadhu is clearly talented at computer graphics, but that some of the ideas he got from Pallathadka Keshava Bhat may be flawed.
Thanks for that. If someone would do a video showing the correct motions (Sun through the Milky Way, planets around the Sun while doing so) that would be useful (and cool). It would also be helpful to us, the lay public, to see how Sol and the other stars in the galaxy move in comparison to one another, around the galaxy. Why? Because DJ Sadhu’s video gives the impression the Sun’s moving, but doesn’t show how the other stars move too. I don’t think he intended to ignore that, but it’s easy to get that impression, even so. A video that shows how things really work would be very neat.
This video runs 3:29 and shows “Asteroid Discovery from 1980 – 2011”. It starts kind of slow, but that gives you a chance to find the blue dots of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Jupiter. Then white dots show newly discovered asteroids, that are then tracked in green. Or in red, if they have an ‘Earth crossing’ trajectory.
About minute 1:50 discoveries speed up with new telescopes adding to the search. Near the last the asteroid belt is heavily green, and yet the white flashes of new discoveries continue on. The red shows the danger we are in every day. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONUSP23cmAE
This image shows Voyager 1 and Voyager 2’s angle of exit to the Heliopause.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voyager_1_entering_heliosheath_region.jpg
Neat! Thank you!
I’m not saying this is true, just that it explains the 55 degree tilt of our solar system in relation to the plane of the Milky Way… see the two images in this blurb… “We’re Not From The Milky Way Galaxy! We’re Sagittarians, Say Scientists!” http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread689434/pg1 The sun is from a place with the unfamiliar name of the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy ?