Using Shadows To Measure the Geysers of Enceladus 27
The Bad Astronomer writes "A lot of folks are posting about the amazing new pictures of the icy moon Enceladus returned from the Cassini spacecraft. However, one of them shows the shadow of the moon across the geyser plumes. This has been seen before, but I suddenly realized how that can help determine the geysers' locations, and I thought Slashdot readers might be interested in the general method."
Uh oh (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.ciclops.org/view_media/36124/Tethys_Rev_164_Raw_Preview_1 [ciclops.org]
That's no moon. It's a space station!
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Looks more like the DS' graphics of Yavin and its moon with the R-R-Rebel base.
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I vote Mimas [wikipedia.org] for being no moon.
News for nerds... (Score:1, Insightful)
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Sadly, this is probably true, but at least some of us nerds will have clicked it. And possibly even RTFA'd.
Nerdy-purdy! (Score:4, Informative)
Icons of this [ciclops.org]. It shall be done.
Gorgeous, gorgeous.
Re:I want my 5 minutes back (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's your five minutes back. The balance of eternity is for people that understand how wondrous this is.
By the way, you are wrong about the "Slashdot whore" part, just so you know. Sites like "Bad Astronomy" qualify as being one of the main reasons Slashdot was created.
Re:I want my 5 minutes back (Score:5, Insightful)
No, he CAN'T have his five minutes back - you know the rules, no refunds on Slashdot except through the complaints department.
"The Bad Astronomer" has been around long enough, and has enough credibility, that anyone who claims he's a karma whore is de-facto neither a nerd nor a geek and should gerroff our collective lawns.
Obvious Geometry is indeed Obvious. This guy, Euclid, wrote some of the Obvious Geometry down and used it as a teaching manual. Nobody had done that before. Everyone in his time knew the rules he was describing (Archimedes regarded them as insultingly simple), but few had understood the fundamentals (what was axiomatic, what was derivative) and absolutely nobody had thought of actually explaining things before. The result of him doing so caused the number of mathematicians and their skills to explode. The learning curve had become dramatically shallower.
This is really no different. Sure, it's basic but the learning curve of WHY it works, HOW it works and WHEN/WHERE it can be used is NOT common knowledge. This makes teaching the relationship of maths and astronomy a cakewalk. I have no objections to more people seeing why geometry and maths are relevant (a common complaint is that they aren't ever used anywhere, but that's because nobody explains why, yes, they are). I regard it as the sole opportunity for turning the world into people who can think for themselves.
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"The Bad Astronomer" has been around long enough, and has enough credibility, that...
...my 78yo dad sends me links to his articles. As for this article the explaination is easy to grasp, invariably the hardest part is spotting what is right under your nose and thinking "That's odd?".
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The result of him doing so caused the number of mathematicians and their skills to explode.
I read that as "The result of him doing so caused the number of mathematicians and their skulls to explode."
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Had the Vikings invented geometry.....
When I first saw this.... (Score:1)
... I thought it was story about geysers of enchiladas....
Beautiful. (Score:3)
Two serious questions: (Score:2, Interesting)
2) Unrelated, but what the hell are those things at lower left (and two of them crossing in upper-mid-to-upper-right)this pic [ciclops.org] from a more more sane 17000 km? Ridiculously long crater chains from ejecta, or something rolling/bounci
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They're either lava (ice?) tubes, sealed-over ice fissures, or lairs of the Mole-Men.
OK, then what? (Score:2)
Do we have enough photos of Enceladus' surface (illuminated, from different angles) so that we can look at these locations and see what lies there? Now that could be interesting.
Least comments ever. (Score:3)
This article has the least comments I've ever seen for an article on the homepage. Only 16 comments after 7+ hours. What's happening with Slashdot??
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I went to badasstronomy to read the article, but it was slashdotted :(
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Most of the comments on other articles are opinions. Political articles seem to get the most back and forth comments. This article just presents interesting facts, and simple facts that people accept don't elicit much opinions.
A Challenge! (Score:2)
Science Fair (Score:1)
A girl in my highschool back in 1988 was used voyager I or II photos (I can't recall which) to calculate the depth of craters on a couple of Jupiter's moons. Which is little different than what the article is describing, but it seems shadows have a lot more information encoded in them. This girl and I ended up winning the science fair and going on to the International science fair, where I felt a bit out of my league. She won a few awards. Apparently at that point no one had thought to do that up to tha