Cassini’s First Grand Finale Dive

Cassini has made its first dive between the rings and Saturn. It is not in contact with Earth at this time and is expected to regain contact via NASA’s Deep Space Network no earlier than around midnight PDT on April 26, 2017 (3 a.m. EDT on April 27, 2017).

Cassini’s First Grand Finale Dive

 A collection of graphics, documents, 
videos and other resources that showcase the Cassini mission's 
Grand Finale on Sept. 15, 2017...
 

Cassini Mission Gallery  

Nine Ways Cassini-Huygens Matters

 

Ouch! U of T paleontologists identify 508-million-year-old sea creature with can opener-like pincers

Paleontologists at the University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) have uncovered a new fossil species that sheds light on the origin of mandibulates, the most abundant and diverse group of organisms on Earth, to which belong familiar animals such as flies, ants, crayfish and centipedes.

Ouch! U of T paleontologists identify 508-million-year-old sea creature with can opener-like pincers

Holographic Principle and Stereograms

Stereograms have interested me ever since they were popularized by the Magic Eye book series.  At first I thought stereograms were just some sort of faddish scam, but after a lot of practise, I was able to perceive them and have been fascinated by them every since, particularly as a powerful metaphor for meaning lurking beneath the apparent surface of things.

Nasa's Astronomy Picture of the day is on the theme of the Holographic Principle and offers this explanation and the picture below:

Is this picture worth a thousand words? According to the Holographic Principle, the most information you can get from this image is about 3 x 1065 bits for a normal sized computer monitor. The Holographic Principle, yet unproven, states that there is a maximum amount of information content held by regions adjacent to any surface. Therefore, counter-intuitively, the information content inside a room depends not on the volume of the room but on the area of the bounding walls. The principle derives from the idea that the Planck length, the length scale where quantum mechanics begins to dominate classical gravity, is one side of an area that can hold only about one bit of information. The limit was first postulated by physicist Gerard 't Hooft in 1993. It can arise from generalizations from seemingly distant speculation that the information held by a black hole is determined not by its enclosed volume but by the surface area of its event horizon. The term "holographic" arises from a hologram analogy where three-dimension images are created by projecting light though a flat screen. Beware, other people looking at the featured image may not claim to see 3 x 1065 bits -- they might claim to see a teapot.

Nasa Educational Picture of the Day

The  Computer Graphics Lab at Caltech 
offers the following explanation of this stereogram...

 These explanations are provided on an archived web page by Erik Winfree at Caltech who provides a further information about this project: 

Erik's SIRDS Collection

IMAGINARY NUMBERS SAVE LIVES AT SEA!

 Paul Halmos in his article "Innovation in Mathematics" from Scientific American Magazine,  September 1958...

Ten Equations that Changed the World

Ten Equations that Changed the World

Timeline of the Far Future

 Explore the Far Future, based on data from NASA, Nature and climate experts The Potsdam Institute...

Timeline of the Far Future

NASA Image and Video Library

NASA's new image and video library consolidates imagery spread across 60 collections into one searchable locations. Users can embed content in their own sites and choose from multiple resolutions, including the original size, to download. Users can see the metadata associated with images, including EXIF/camera data on many images...

NASA'S NEW IMAGE AND VIDEO LIBRARY