All posts by dpatter

Game Dev, Physics

GDC 2012 – Monday

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The 2012 Game Developers’ Conference officially got started this morning. For me, it seemed like a late start with the first sessions beginning at 10am. For someone who’s up at 5am on a regular basis, that’s a lot of morning time to kill before getting started! Fortunately, my camera is with me everywhere and I had lots of time to explore before hitting Mel’s Drive-In Diner for breakfast.

The “discovering new experiences” part of the day started VERY early as I experienced my first earthquake. A 4.0 magnitude quake struck the Bay Area at 5:30 this morning. While it wasn’t that strong of a quake, it was still disconcerting while occupying a room on the 8th floor of an old, sketchy hotel! At least now I can scratch “survive an earthquake” off of my bucket list.

Sessions for the day were part of the Math for Game Programmers tutorial. In the past, this has been a weak tutorial, but I was pleasantly surprised by its evolution. While the oratory skills of the organizer had still not improved one bit, nor had his specific talk, the quality of the other presenters and presentations improved quite a bit. First out of the gate was a talk on Bezier curves and splines. Might have to see about working curves and splines into the MATH/PHYS 191 course. It would be a natural succession to introduce them after we discuss parametric equations.

There was also a good talk on collision detection methods which reaffirmed that the work we’re doing in the MATH/PHYS 191 course is in line with what’s being done in the field. All very interesting, and I’ll have links to the slides in time. The last talk of the day was about data as paramount when thinking about how to construct code. The speaker’s motto was “understand the data, and you understand the problem”. As a computational physicist, my reaction was, “Duh!” Preaching to the choir, there.

One of the great things about coming to San Francisco is having the opportunity to meet up with some of my friends and fellow IndyCar fans from Twitter. Tonight, I was introduced to a new place, Pesce, which specialized in tapas-style seafood dishes. It was fabulous! I would include a pic of the lobster ravioli and the pan-seared scallops, but they didn’t stick around long enough. Delicious!

So the first day was successful. At least more than it had been in past years. Tuesday, the second day of the tutorial, is all about Physics for Game Programmers. It will be interesting to see what new things they bring to the sessions this year. Also, the IGDA party is Tuesday night! It’s never been a real blow-out type of party, but at least there’s free food.

Astronomy, Hobbies, Photography, Science

Imaging the Night Sky in Motion

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So I’ve been meaning to try something new for a while now and I just got it worked out (sorta) this past week. I’ve always enjoyed photographing the night sky, but I really wanted to work on taking images that showed the sky in motion. It’s so easy to go outside, glance up at the sky, and think of it as static and unchanging, but if you look carefully enough, you’ll see that it’s in constant motion. I did a lot of work last year imaging the sky in a static way, either by shooting through a telescope with a clock drive, or by stacking a succession of individual images. While I really enjoyed some of the images that I captured through those methods, they didn’t really portray how rapidly things move around in our night sky.

In thinking of ways to demonstrate this motion, the first obvious choice was to do a typical “star trails” image. I’ve attempted these type of images before, but this past week, I tried to up my game a bit. My trails images before were only about 10 to 15 minutes in length, but the one I took last Thursday was approximately an hour-long exposure. The resulting image turned out pretty good, all things considered. I have a dusk-to-dawn light (that I need to put on a switch!) that’s great for security, but not so great for viewing the night sky. To combat its effects, I set my camera up on its tripod on the far side of my barn so that the barn blocked most of the light. The trees and surrounding ground, as you can see in the image, were still fully illuminated. My light and others around the area also light up the sky, so rather than a deep, dark background sky, I got a kinda pink-ish background. The star trails themselves, came out great.

Here’s the EXIF data for the image.

Camera Nikon D7000
Exposure 3099
Aperture f/5.0
Focal Length 18 mm
ISO Speed 200
Exposure Bias 0 EV

Even if you don’t have a tripod, you can still try this type of shot for yourself. You will need something to keep the camera steady. A beanbag or a bag of rice will work just fine. You will also need a remote shutter release. Find either a bright star or planet and manually focus on it, then set your camera to manual mode and set the shutter speed to “bulb”, and your aperture to your lens’ sweet spot. For the lens I was using, that happens to be about f/5.0. Even though it’s night, don’t use a high ISO. The length of the exposure will gather all the light you need. Once it’s ready, lock the shutter button down and go back inside where it’s warm and wait. 🙂

Practice, practice, practice, and share your star trails pics, tips, and suggestions in the comments section below.

Science

The Radio Beacon That Started the Space Age

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On October 4th, 1957, the Soviet Union became the first nation to successfully place an object into orbit around the Earth. That object was Sputnik-1 and it scared the crap out of us. At the time, most people felt very secure in the technological superiority of our country, a belief that still persists with many, but hearing that the Soviets had beat us to orbit, and then SEEING the small little basketball-sized satellite as it passed overhead stripped away the arrogant confidence that many had that we would prevail against our Cold War enemy in every single endeavor, including being the first to Space. This spawned a movement within the Western World, including the US, to “step up to the plate” and push science and engineering hard in the classroom. Teachers, students, and industry were strongly motivated to bring young, bright minds into the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. Seeing where STEM enrollment and participation is today, perhaps we need another Sputnik. While I wouldn’t normally suggest a fictional movie as a reference, especially one from Hollywood, the movie, October Sky does an excellent job of capturing the attitudes and emotions of the time.

Related to all this is story that was relayed to be my by long-time mentor, Dr. Thomas Armstrong, a space science researcher and educator who has been involved in the space science business since it was a business, and studied at the University of Iowa under the great James Van Allen. Sputnik’s successful orbits, and the Soviets’ great achievement, wasn’t really the wasn’t the signal of our technological inferiority as many had feared. President Eisenhower had played a very shrewd and clever game. We had a launch vehicle and a payload quite capable of reaching low-Earth orbit before the Soviets. The Vanguard project was an effort designed to launch a civilian satellite into orbit, which it eventually succeeded in doing, but there was a military effort in place before Vanguard. That effort quite possibly could have succeeded, but the political costs of that success would far outweight any strategic or propaganda-based benefit. Eisenhower had ordered that the test launch absolutely, under no circumstances, be allowed to achieve orbit. In response to that order, the third-stage fuel tank was drained, and the planned flight to orbit failed as planned.

The reaction by the American public to Sputnik, driving students and industry to STEM education, lead to a flood of young, bright, eager, and highly motivated scientists, technicians, and engineers, and America surged forward. Not even a year after the launch of Sputnik, Eisenhower formed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). From that moment forward, NASA was the unrivaled leader of space exploration and rocket engineering. In a very real way, not launching a satellite when we could have and allowing the Soviets to be the first into space, allowed for an environment that would see the US surge forward by leaps and bounds with scientists and engineers being seen as rock stars! We can have those days back again, all we need is to value science, technology, engineering and mathematics in the same way now as we did in the 50s and 60s.

Astronomy, Photography

Astrophotography FTW!

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I had hopes of doing a LOT more astrophotography than I actually did over the summer. It seemed like every time I was home and free, it was either cloudy or so humid that dewfall was a constant problem. This weekend, I finally had time and good skies to go out and take some deep sky images. Some pics turned out, some didn’t. …I really need to work on my planetary photo skills.

I was able to capture a decent image of The Andromeda Galaxy, M31, and the Dumbell Nebula, M27. In both cases, I used JCCC’s 8″ Meade SCT on LX200 base mounted on an equatorial wedge with my Nikon D7000 mounted on the back. My alignment wasn’t great, so I couldn’t integrate any longer than 10-15s per image, but I took a few dozen images of each object and stacked them to produce a single long-exposure equivalent image.

M31-BW

M27-TheDumbellNebula

I’m hoping to get some solar images today, so check back later for some new shots.

Astronomy, Science

Beware of People Wearing Tin Foil Hats – Comet Elenin

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As an astronomer, I hear all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories about what the government and scientists are trying to hide from the general public. I can’t speak about what the government may or may not hide, but I can say that by and large scientists don’t much care about the opinion of the general public when it comes to their assessment of data and the analysis of what those data imply about our Universe. First and foremost, we are beholden to data collected through methods that can be replicated and verified by others. This is where the “Comet Elenin is a space ship” or “Comet Elenin is a dwarf star” or “Comet Elenin is going to strike the Earth” conspiracies fail.

Comet Hale-Bopp imaged by my predecessor Paul Tebbe.
As with many other conspiracy manifestos and ramblings, the YouTube videos I’ve seen regarding Comet Elenin have been more like Star Trek technobabble than science. It seems as though people pull a word from here, a piece of jargon from there, and try to stitch together the biggest gloom-and-doom story imaginable. The fact is, there are a lot of highly trained and skilled eyeballs on this comet. It was originally hoped that since it was to come reasonably close to Earth, 90 Lunar orbital radii, that it might provide a nice show in our night skies much like Comet Hale-Bopp did in 1997. Unforutunately, Elenin appears to have fragmented and faded in intensity. No awesome comet show for us. However, there won’t be any world-ending catastrophe, either!

Rebuttals:
Comet Elenin is a space ship:
Ok, if someone actually believes this, I don’t think there’s anything that can be said to dissuade them short of actually taking them to the comet and letting them stand on its surface themselves. …but then perhaps even that won’t do it. All I can say is that it looks like a comet, acts like a comet, and orbits like a comet.

Comet Elenin is a dwarf star:
A comet is an icy body which appears to us as a fuzzy ball with an extending tail as the comet approaches the Sun. The sunlight heats up the sunward side of the comet causing the ice to vaporize creating a temporary atmosphere of sorts for the comet nucleus. The dust and gas released from the surface of the comet as the volitiles (water, carbon dioxide, cyanogen) vaporize are blown back by the solar wind, creating the tail structure. A dwarf star by comparison is a …well… STAR. Its a ball of incandescent gas made hot by thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen at its core. The smallest of these, a brown dwarf, although small by stellar standards are still at least 80x the size of Jupiter. Comet Elenin is most definitely NOT a dwarf star.

Comet Elenin is going to impact the Earth:
While having an extraterrestrial impactor strike our planet, either a comet or asteroid, will likely occur at some time in the future, it’s not going to happen with Comet Elenin. Comet and asteroid strikes are a large concern to the scientific community and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has a Near-Earth Object (NEO) program in place to identify and track potentially hazardous objects. You can read more about Comet Elenin’s trajectory on JPL’s Asteroid Watch.