When the Sun belches out an eructation of subatomic particles, they can travel across the solar system and interact with the Earth’s magnetic field. This can make our field ring like a bell, shaking the particles trapped within, and generating electromagnetic noise and signals across the radio spectrum. The CARISMA radio array can detect these emissions and learn about how the Sun’s and Earth’s fields interact.

That’s the science. But there’s art here, too: the Lighthouse agency commissioned artists to create digital artwork based on science, and one group, Semiconductor, used the CARISMA data to do so. Based on the data, they translated the radio waves (which are like the light we see, but less energetic) and converted them to sound. This has been done many times before, but what’s cool is that they then created an animation based on the converted sounds, an astonishing and odd and mesmerizing animation. Watch:

How wild is that? It reminds me of the movie "Forbidden Planet". The vibrating patterns are wonderful, and while I’m not sure how much scientific insight can be gained from them, the aesthetics are riveting. And I can hope the underlying purpose of this will be seen: to show that science is beauty, science is art, and that if this gets someone who might not otherwise be interested to poke a little further into it, then mission accomplished.

On October 28th, the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project (NPP) satellite launched into low-Earth orbit from Vandenberg Air Force base in California. Designed to observe Earth’s environment and climate, it’s in an 800 km (500 mile) orbit, and on November 21 it took its first images of the planet below.

And what a picture! Check. This. Out.

[Click to engaiaenate.]

What’s that, I hear you ask? It doesn’t look like that big a deal? That’s because I had to shrink the flippin’ huge 6000×6000 original image to fit the blog! The whole swath shows the planet from Canada to South America, but here’s a closer-up version:
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Astronaut Ron Garan’s photography is a common feature here at BA Central, and although his still photos are incredible, he hadn’t tried time-lapse photography until his last trip up to the space station.

He took a series of images and he himself created a video from them, called "Time Lapse From Space – Literally. The Journey Home". It’s similar to the time lapse I posted recently of the Earth from space, but has some new stuff in it:

Breathtaking, isn’t it?

This is part of a project Ron is working on called Fragile Oasis, an effort to get everyone to see the Earth as a single home for humanity, and to inspire people to make a difference, change things for the better. About his feelings as he gazed down on the Earth from space, Ron writes:

It was very moving to see the beauty of the planet we’ve been given. But as I looked down at this indescribably beautiful fragile oasis, this island that has been given to us and has protected all life from the harshness of space, I couldn’t help thinking of the inequity that exists.

I couldn’t help but think of the people who don’t have clean water to drink, enough food to eat, of the social injustice, conflict, and poverty that exist.

The stark contrast between the beauty of our planet and the unfortunate realities of life for many of its inhabitants reaffirmed the belief I share with so many. Each and every one of us on this planet has the responsibility to leave it a little better than we found it.

I can’t argue with that. In fact, I strongly support this effort, and hope everyone out there spreads the word.

Space Shuttle astronaut Ron Garan should be familiar to regular BA readers; I’ve featured a lot of the photos he’s taken from space here on the blog. He’s been posting more of them on Google+, and he just put up this gorgeous shot of the Moon over the limb of the Earth:

Spectacular! [Click to enlunanate.]

I thought at first the Moon was a day after full in this image. If the terminator — the line dividing day and night — is on the bottom, then the Moon was a day past full. But the bottom also looks a bit squished, which may be due to Earth’s atmosphere distorting the shape of the Moon. So it’s really hard to tell. Unfortunately Ron didn’t post the date of the picture, so I’m not sure of the exact phase.

But then, it doesn’t really matter. It’s close enough to full, and not being sure of the exact phase neither bugs me nor detracts from the amazing beauty of the picture he took as he sailed around the Earth on board the space station.

So I finally watched the pilot episodes of the new Fox scifi drama "Terra Nova" (it airs Mondays at 8:00 p.m. ET). I found it watchable, with some potential, and like every other TV show in existence (except "Firefly") it had some things I liked and some I didn’t. I got email about it due to a couple of lines in the pilot, which I’ll get to in a sec. First, a quick overview.

Gotta get back in time

The idea behind the show (no real spoilers here, since this is all explained in the first minute of the program) is that by the year 2149, the Earth is dying. Pollution, global warming, and so on have made the planet nearly uninhabitable. People need rebreathers just to go outside, and many scenes show huge chimneys pumping smoke into the air just to hammer home that point. Population control is mandatory; having more than two kids is an invitation for the police to come.

The show centers on a family – cop father, brilliant doctor mother, rebellious teenage son, science whiz-kid teenage daughter, and their youngest, a girl. And yeah, if you count three kids, good for you! That drives part of the plot in Part 1 of the show, so I won’t spoil it.

The big plot device in the show is that a fracture in time is discovered — how and why are not disclosed, perhaps to be revealed in a later episode — that goes to 85 million years in the past. People are being sent back in time to populate the still-clean planet, save humanity, fight dinosaurs, and so on.

I’ll note that I like how the time travel was handled. When we join the story, time travel has already been around a while — this family is sent back as part of the tenth wave of colonists — so the writers didn’t have to spend a lot of time talking about how it was done. It just is. Also, the writers circumvented the inevitable fan rage with a short expository scene stating how this isn’t really our past; the time line has split, so it doesn’t matter if you step on a butterfly or eat an entire herd of dinosaurs. It won’t change the future. That made me smile. Score one (pre-emptively) for the writers.

Of course, the show tried to distance itself from "Jurassic Park", and did so by having the first look at the dinosaurs be a herd of brachiosaurs, and then having the main characters in souped-up jeeps getting chased by a carnivorous velociraptor/T-Rex-like animal.

Um, yeah. Oops.

I’m no paleontologist, and I like watching dinosaurs with big sharp teeth eat a person as much as the next guy, so that part was fine. But then they went a little bit out of their way to add some astronomy, and kinda blew it. So I have to jump in here a bit.

What follows is me nitpicking the science of a couple of lines of dialogue. I don’t do this to be petty — I gave up on that in my reviews a long time ago — but just to use these lines to point out the real science. Any snarking is incidental.

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If you’ve ever wondered what it must feel like to fly around the Earth at 28,000 kilometers per hour, then wonder no more.

[Make sure you set it to the highest resolution, then make it full screen. You're welcome.]

I saw this on Universe Today, where you can get details, as well as in the YouTube link above. Created by James Drake, it’s a compilation of 600 publicly available images, strung together to make an incredible time lapse animation. The actual motion of the International Space Station would appear much slower than this, but still. The clarity, color, dynamism, and sheer jaw-dropping wonder of this is spectacular to behold.

A lot of people on Twitter were asking about the brown-green arc above the Earth. That’s an aerosol haze, a glow caused by particles suspended high above the planet’s surface. It’s an extremely thin layer, so it’s best seen edge-on, for the same reason some very thin shells in space are bright only around the edges. From the ground it’s too faint to see this clearly, and from space it’s only visible on the night side of Earth.

This is truly magnificent. And the ending is, I hope, a metaphor for the future of human exploration of space. Things may seem dark now, but I am still hopeful that a new day will dawn on our efforts to reach out into the Universe around us.

Sometimes, my favorite pictures from space are among the ones that look least interesting… until you understand what you’re seeing.

For example, this doesn’t look like much, does it?

Ah, but that picture shows so, so much. It shows everything!

That’s us. You, me, everyone. That fuzzy blob on the left? That’s Earth. The one on the right: the Moon.

In this one simple picture, you can see everywhere humans have ever been; hundreds of thousands of years spent on Earth, and a few brief days on the Moon. And this picture was taken from much farther than anyone has ever traveled.

This view of our home worlds was seen by Juno, a spacecraft launched on August 5. By August 26th, when it took this snapshot, it was already nearly 10 million kilometers (6 million miles) away. And yet this is merely a baby step compared to its total journey: it will take a long, sweeping path to Jupiter, traveling nearly 3 billion kilometers before arriving at its destination.

Take another look at that picture. See how close together they look? It took humans more than three days to bridge that gulf from one of those clumps of pixels to the other.

Pictures like this are important. They remind us that of where we really are, how much we’ve achieved, how far we have to go. And that our planet really is just a pale blue dot, swimming in a vast, empty black ocean.

Of course, there are better words about this I can muster. Perhaps now would be a good time to refresh yourself about them.