What Does Sunset On an Alien World Look Like? 94
The Bad Astronomer writes "Using real data from Hubble Space Telescope of a planet orbiting another star, exoplanetary scientist Frédéric Pont created a lovely image of what sunset would look like from HD209458b, nicknamed Osiris, a planet 150 light years away. The Hubble data gave information on the atmospheric absorption of this hot Jupiter planet, and, coupled with models of how the atmosphere was layered, Pont was able to create a realistic looking sunset on the planet. The big surprise: the star looks green as it sets! Sodium absorption sucks out the red colors and blue is scattered away, leaving just the green hues to get through. It's a lovely application of hard scientific knowledge."
And apparently... (Score:5, Funny)
...they get overloaded servers there too. :P
Looks very familar (Score:5, Funny)
It looks to me like the sunset has a striking resemblance to a 500 error.
Re:And apparently... (Score:2, Funny)
Actually, the link is working perfectly. The civilization that lives on HD209458b eventually surrounded their entire planet in orbiting solar panels for maximum clean power generation. The inside of the panels is an LCD screen that plays back a prerecorded video giving the illusion of a sun, moon and stars. However, despite all their technological advancement, the system isn't quite perfect yet, and every day at the exact moment the sun sets, the whole system crashes and kicks up an Internal Server Error until they reboot and you can see the moon. It's surprising the artist was able recreate is so faithfully.