Astronomy

You’ve got to try this out

Universe Sandbox lets you “Smash planets together, introduce rogue stars, and build new worlds from spinning discs of debris. Fire a moon into a planet or destroy everything you’ve created with a super massive black hole.”.

This is a fantastic and fun way to learn about physics, and smash a few celestial bodies up along the way. I’ve never seen anything quite like this before, so hats off to the developer for coming up with something pretty unique.

Interestingly, there’s no fixed price for the application. Simply pay the author what you think it’s worth. Can’t ask fairer than that!

If you’re interested in astronomy, the news of the release of Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope probably hasn’t escaped you, but if it has, get yourself over to their web site now – you’re in for a treat.

In Microsoft’s own words, WorldWide Telescope is “A service free of charge from Microsoft lets students and lifelong learners tour the night sky using high-resolution images from the world’s best land- and space-based telescopes.”

The program is for Windows only, although I’ve been running it successfully on my MacBook Pro using VMWare’s Fusion. Performace is very good and the imagery is simply stunning.

I found it a little fiddly setting my home location – you have to manually search through a very long list to find it, unless I’m missing something.

Once you’ve set your location (or any other, for that matter), you’re free to roam the night sky. The user interface is very intuitive – simply drag the sky around to pan in any direction. The mouse wheel allows you to zoom in and out at will.

You are provided with a number of “Tours” and pre-configured places to Explore, such as the planets. You can easily track objects, either in real-time, or at a defined time-rate (e.g. X10, X100 etc).

I’ve only begun to scratch the surface, but my initial impressions are very favourable. If you have even the slightest interest in astronomy, I’d thoroughly recommend you download it. It’s free, so you’ve got nothing to lose!

I recently stumbled upon this neat looking browser based Solar System Simulator from NASA’s JPL.

Okay, it might not be Google Sky, but it’s certainly useful if you want a quick image generated straight from your browser.

The application is very quick. The following image came back in less than a second.