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Comet Hartley 2 is a small comet, with a diameter of about 1.5 km, and with an orbital period of 6.46 years. It was discovered by Malcolm Hartley in 1986 in Australia. The Deep Impact spacecraft will flyby Hartley 2 on November 4, 2010, having previously visited comet 9P/Tempel in 2005. At its closest approach, the spacecraft will be 700 kilometers away from the comet. Right now it is visible through binoculars and small telescopes. It may brighten enough to be seen with the visible eye in the near future.

The comet will be closest to Earth on October 20, 2010. On October 28, 2010 the comet will reach its closest approach to the sun. The next time that we should see is Hartley 2 is around April, 2017.

Hubble Space Telescope observations of comet 103P/Hartley 2, taken on September 25, are helping in the planning for a November 4 flyby of the comet by NASA’s Deep Impact eXtended Investigation (DIXI) spacecraft.

Analysis of the new Hubble data shows that the nucleus has a diameter of approximately 0.93 miles (1.5 km), which is consistent with previous estimates.

The comet is in a highly active state, as it approaches the Sun. The Hubble data show that the coma is remarkably uniform, with no evidence for the types of outgassing jets seen from most “Jupiter Family” comets, of which Hartley 2 is a member.

After the break is an image of Hartley 2 from the WISE space telescope.

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Science astronomy, hubble, nasa

Water vapor plays a large role in the weather on our planet. It is critical for cloud formation, lightning, and keeping the surface of the Earth warm. However, the amount of water in the atmosphere changes frequently. Above deserts, only a trace amount is found. Above the oceans one will find that water vapor accounts for about 4% of the air.

Of the 1.39 billion cubic kilometers (331 million cubic miles) of water on Earth, just a thousandth of 1% (1.39 million cubic km) exists as water vapor. Yet this tiny amount of water has an outsized influence on the planet: It is a potent greenhouse gas and a major driver of weather and climate.

This map shows the distribution of water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere during August 2010. Even the wettest regions would form a layer of water only 60 millimeters (2.4 inches) deep if the entire column of air was condensed from the top of the atmosphere to the surface. The map was compiled from observations by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) and the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU-A) on NASA’s Aqua satellite.

via A Little Water Goes a Long Way : Image of the Day.

Science nasa, scientific visualization

The 2011 Digital Entertainment Conference will be on October 13th from noon to 6pm Eastern Time, but with one important difference this year: It’s completely online. If you’re an artist living in the US, you can stream all of the talks directly to your PC for free.  And this isn’t some hokey fly-by-nite conference either, they’ve got some big names:

Industry professionals presenting at the conference will be:
· Daniel Gregoire, CEO and founder of Halon Entertainment, providing an overview of how his team developed custom tools in Autodesk Maya software for manipulating earth, air, fire and water for M. Night Shyalaman’s “The Last Airbender”
· Mike Mennillo, lead fight animator for Ubisoft, covering the use of Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk MotionBuilder software, as well as Autodesk HumanIK middleware in the development of the soon-to-be released video game “Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood”
· Three speakers from LOOK Effects, discussing how the studio provided full-service visual effects for the sixth and final season of ABC’s “Lost” using Autodesk Maya and Autodesk Flame software

It’s brought with support from HP and AJA Video, as somewhat of a proof of concept and pipeline test. Registration is required, although the event is free.  Get the full details after the break.

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Graphics autodesk, conference

With so many new image formats coming out this week, it seems only prudent to put them through some paces.  In this short feature, find some results about how the various algorithms actually work in practice.  There are a few important questions I wanted to answer:

• Which one offers the best compression?
• Which one offers the most visually pleasing results?
• Which one offers the most numerically accurate results?

So I set out to test all three of them and see which one fared the best.  Using first the CIE 1931 Chromaticity diagram, and then a real photograph, I ran several tests.  The results are all inside after the break.

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Science comparison, feature, hipix, image, webm

The internet is awesome, we all know that. But unfortunately, it’s still not for everyone, as we can see on Woorkup newest design. From Blogging Pro comes the WordPress by Jazz Legends infographic, and the creative folks at xkcd made a second version of the Online Communities Map. Orange Soda shows us the power of local Mobile Search, and we finish with the Web’s best education Hacks, by Degree Scout.

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Graphics, Science design, economy, environment, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations

Who’s Suing Whom In The Telecoms Trade?

Graphics, Science digest, infographics, list

This week at the 3D Film Festival in Hollywood, CA, a new movie about the UK Stree Dance championships called ‘Streetdance 3D’ showcased some great dancing with 3D Stereoscopic effects.  The work was done by Post Republic and ParadiseFX, taking data from six cameras twice a day through full color correction, sync correction, and alignment for review through IRIDAS SpeedGrade DI.

The captured material was then sent twice daily to the digital lab for archiving, processing and quality control, while the cutting room received HD rushes every day.

“We were handling quite a large amount of data from six cameras,” said Digital-Lab supervisor, Andreas Schellenberg.  “We were very satisfied with the daily stereo footage we received from Paradise FX.  They really did a great job on precise sync, color and alignment of the paired cameras.”

“It was invaluable having the D-lab regularly conform my sequences into a 3DS environment. This gave me the abilty to understand precisely how my 2D edits were translating into the 3DS world,” added editor, Tim Murrell.

Video was coming from a pair of RED Camera rigs, along with pairs of SI2K cameras. Everything was fully motorized for the highest quality convergence controls.  The press release offers a great insight into the massive amount of work and equipment that goes into the 3D Process.  Read it all after the break.

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Graphics, Hardware movie, stereoscopic

It seems no matter what field you work in these days, if you work with computers you’ve probably heard of the language “Python”.  Currently the core of scripting systems in tools varying from Nuke to Maya to ParaView, the amazing flexibility and simplicity of the language make it an attractive choice for both developers and users.  This week’s recommended resources goes out to Python novices and experts alike, starting with O’Reilly’s “Learning Python“.

The authors of Learning Python show you enough essentials of the Python scripting language to enable you to begin solving problems right away, then reveal more powerful aspects of the language one at a time. This approach is sure to appeal to programmers and system administrators who have urgent problems and a preference for learning by semi-guided experimentation.First off, Learning Python shows the relationships among Python scripts and their interpreter (in a mostly platform-neutral way). Then, the authors address the mechanics of the language itself, providing illustrations of how Python conceives of numbers, strings, and other objects as well as the operators you use to work with them. Dictionaries, lists, tuples, and other data structures specific to Python receive plenty of attention including complete examples.

Authors Mark Lutz and David Ascher build on that fundamental information in their discussions of functions and modules, which evolve into coverage of namespaces, classes, and the object-oriented aspects of Python programming. There’s also information on creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for Python applications with Tkinter.

And if just learning the basics isn’t enough, then jump-start your Python skills with a full collection of code snippets with O’Reilly’s Python Cookbook.

Updated for Python 2.4, The Python Cookbook, 2nd Edition offers a wealth of useful code for all Python programmers, not just advanced practitioners. Like its predecessor, the new edition provides solutions to problems that Python programmers face everyday.

It now includes over 200 recipes that range from simple tasks, such as working with dictionaries and list comprehensions, to complex tasks, such as monitoring a network and building a templating system. This revised version also includes new chapters on topics such as time, money, and metaprogramming.

Here’s a list of additional topics covered:

• Manipulating text
• Searching and sorting
• Working with files and the filesystem
• Object-oriented programming
• Dealing with threads and processes
• System administration
• Interacting with databases
• Creating user interfaces
• Network and web programming
• Processing XML
• Distributed programming
• Debugging and testing

Another advantage of The Python Cookbook, 2nd Edition is its trio of authors–three well-known Python programming experts, who are highly visible on email lists and in newsgroups, and speak often at Python conferences.With scores of practical examples and pertinent background information, The Python Cookbook, 2nd Edition is the one source you need if you’re looking to build efficient, flexible, scalable, and well-integrated systems.

Find this book and many more in the VizWorld Store.

Science feature, python, resource of the week

Some of the language and physics here are way over my head, but the graphic is impressive.  It’s showing the gravitational waves emitted from the collapse of a singularity, commonly known as a black hole.

A paradigm deeply rooted in modern numerical relativity calculations prescribes the removal of those regions of the computational domain where a physical singularity may develop. We here challenge this paradigm by performing three-dimensional simulations of the collapse of uniformly rotating stars to black holes without excision. We show that this choice, combined with suitable gauge conditions and the use of minute numerical dissipation, improves dramatically the long-term stability of the evolutions. In turn, this allows for the calculation of the waveforms well beyond what previously possible, providing information on the black-hole ringing and setting a new mark on the present knowledge of the gravitational-wave emission from the stellar collapse to a rotating black hole.

via Numerical Relativity Group @ Albert Einstein Institute – Germany.

Science

What does it take to actually build a satellite? Besides lots of taxpayer dollars, of course. NASA has published this entertaining video to show us what they go through to build one. NASA uses the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission as an example. The mission of this satellite is to study how the sun interacts with the atmosphere of Mars.

After the break is a video talking more about the MAVEN mission.

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Science astronomy, nasa