These majestic dancing lights in the sky are actually not far removed from the glow of that neon sign down the street. In these gas is trapped in tubes and excited by electric current. While in the aurora charged particles ejected from the sun are funneled towards the poles by the earth's magnetic field where they excite gases in the upper atmosphere. It's the same basic idea but somehow a heck of a lot more beautiful.

LINKS GOOD ON 2006-12-14

In this clear homage to Charles & Ray Eames's Powers of Ten, we start with a meter wide field of view and move back steadily to one some 15 billion light-years across. This clip is from the IMAX film Cosmic Voyage.

I'm conflicted over placing this link here as I doubt it was posted by the copyright holder. However, I hope that you will choose to buy the DVD. There really is no substitute for seeing it on a big screen. So I suggest one of those fancy data projectors. The rest of the film explores the human endeavor of science and is a great discussion starter.

LINKS GOOD ON 2006-12-14

Simple slide show depicting the relative size of objects in the cosmos. Nothing new here, but for my 1st years (12 year-olds), this is just the sort of visual example which gets them thinking. They also really respond to making scale models out of plasticine, and you can get custom dimensions from this site (Build Your Own Solar System).

LINKS GOOD ON 2006-12-14

I remember watching this hours after Spirit's January 3, 2004 landing on MARS. It was wonderfully exciting, watching the project's history then immediately seeing the first images back from the surface. Every NASA mission should be shadowed by such a talented film crew.

This episode is one of two. The second, Welcome to Mars, wasn't available for streaming at the writing of this annotation. You can, however, learn more about these rover missions from the Nova Online Mars site.

LINKS GOOD ON 2006-12-14

TED talk by spacecraft designer Burt Rutan

What's TED? "It's like going back to college for three or four days a year, and you get all the best professors, and they can only talk for fifteen minutes."
-- Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal

Burt Rutan's company Scaled Composites won the Ansari X Prize by building a sub-orbital honest to goodness spacecraft. I've long been skeptical of space tourism. Something about the Soviet model leaves a bad taste in my mouth, a little like millionaires paying to ride on an aircraft carrier during wartime. The X prize and Rutan's vision, however, strike me as different. They aren't the bastardization of scientific exploration but the independent birth of entrepreneurial and adventurous spirit. In this clip, Rutan shares his vision for the future of space flight, and the sky's the limit.

Rutan's brainchild, SpaceShipOne, is a spectacular feat of engineering, a spacecraft built out of fabric and glue!

LINKS GOOD ON 2006-12-14

If Aristotle had grown up in space his physics intuition might have been better. He believed heavy objects fell faster than light ones, but it turns out that when you take drag into account an object's weight doesn't matter. David Scott, Apollo 15 astronaut, tests this prediction made by Galileo Galilei several hundred years after we are told Galileo attempted a similar experiment atop the leaning tower of Pisa. Galileo's tale may be apocryphal, but Scott's is verifiable.

LINKS GOOD ON 2006-12-14

Having just seen a hammer and feather fall at the same rate, it should be no surprise that planes and people too can fall at the same rate. In this clip a plane undergoes a controlled parabolic fall along with its contents. Since the person and the plane are both falling at the same rate the person appears weightless. This is free-fall and why astronauts appear weightless. They are NOT so far from earth that gravity doesn't pull on them. Orbiting is just falling without hitting the ground.

LINKS GOOD ON 2006-12-14