Tell ‘em Neil
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(Pi)cture
The sun, as seen from mars.
I love this picture.
Click the link. Do it.
How to Easily Memorize e to Fifteen Decimal Places
See that picture? It’s a 20 dollar bill, so “2” is the first digit - throw down a decimal after it.
Andrew Jackson was our seventh President, so put a “7” after that - 2.7
Jackson was elected in 1828, so put down “1828″ next. Since he served two consecutive terms, put “1828″ a second time. We’re now up to 2.718281828.
Now pay attention to the red square. The diagonal creates two congruent right triangles with angle measures 45, 90, and 45. So, add on 459045 to get 2.718281828459045. And that’s e to 15 places.
Dark Matter Movie from the Bolshoi Simulation
This is a map of all known stars that lie within 20 light years. There is a total of 83 known star systems within this distance containing 109 stars and 8 brown dwarfs. There is also a negative version of this map, which might be easier to print.
A Census of stars within 20 lys
2 - Type A Stars
1 - Type F Star
6 - Type G Stars
16 - Type K Stars
78 - Type M Stars
1 - Type M Brown Dwarf
1 - Type L Brown Dwarf
6 - Type T Brown Dwarfs
6 - White Dwarf Stars
(via atlasoftheuniverse.com)
And an article that talks about it :
Within twenty light years of our Sun, there are just over 100 stars.
And exactly zero of them are O-stars.
And exactly zero of them are B-stars.
But if we look at the K- and M-stars, they make up over 90% of these stars. In fact, three out of four stars are the reddest, coolest, M-class stars, including the closest star to us.
It looks like a potato
Plateaus and Gaps
This fantastic close-up of Saturn’s outer C ring shows large and sharp changes in brightness across the rings, owing to the extreme variations in ring particle concentrations at different distances from the planet. The dark gap running through the center contains the Maxwell ringlet, as well as a faint, narrow ringlet discovered in Cassini images. Another very dark region to the right of the Maxwell gap is also a narrow gap.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Oct. 29, 2004, at a distance of about 836,000 kilometers (519,000 miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 4.6 kilometers (2.9 miles) per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras, were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.
courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Instituteimage id: PIA06540
