Mark's Astro, Math, Science, Viz and Tech Musings

George Washington on the Value of Science Museums

2007-06-16T16:47:00.000-05:00

from his farewell address in 1796:
"Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened."

SketchUp and Google Earth

2006-04-30T16:11:00.000-05:00

Google recently released a free versionof the 3D modelling program SketchUp. SketchUp makes it really interesting to make architechtural models, and it is tightle integrated with Google Earth. To learn SketchUp I created a 3D model of Adler and Doane and Uploaded then to the 3D Warehouse. As you can see the default model of Adler in Google Earth is terrible! (thats the image on the the top) To add my model to your version of G.E. go here http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/ and search on Adler, museum or planetarium. One problem is that I can't find a way to turn off the old Adler model, but keep the rest of the Chicago buildings. Nevertheless, SketchUp + Google Earth holds lots of promise for interesting projects (annotated tours of observatories and the like).

I uploaded this model a hour ago and there are already 30 or so more recent than mine. Its a really clever thing Google is doing. Right now they have simple models for a handful of urban areas. Now they will get the public to model the entire world for them.

Cosmus image in Astronomy Magazine

2005-08-04T21:37:00.000-05:00

The latest issue of Astronomy Magazine contains one of our cosmic ray airshower visualizations. Dinoj really deservs all the credit for this one. You can see the article here.

Cool Stuff at NextFest Part IV: Wrap Up

2005-07-22T07:45:00.000-05:00

Well there were many more cool things, but those were the main ones I saw applications for (now if I only could think of a way to use brainball or the power assist suit). But there were a couple of other things worth considering. The panoscope 360 from the University of Montreal could be a great venue for my galaxy flythrough, particularily if we completed the other half of the sphere. Also the fogscreen is a pretty cool (video projection on a sheet of fog that you can walk through). I had been thinking about uses for the fogscreen before, so it was nice to see it in action. The image isn't great but people did really seem to enjoy it.

Cool Stuff at NextFest Part III: GelForce

2005-07-22T07:36:00.000-05:00

Another interesting product out of the University of Tokoyo is the GelForce electronic touchpad. It has a deformable surface into which are embedded two layers of different colored LED's. A camera underneath the surface shows the displacement of these surfaces allowing the internal forces to be calculated. Eventually they imagine using this kind of setup to create robot skin. What they were showing at NextFest was basically just different maps of the force surface as you pressed the pad - one even distorting a Galaxy image. A possible application for the cosmology gallery would be just that - gravitational lensing. You could press the pad and see how it distorts the image - try one finger to simulate lensing by a black hole , your fist to represent a cluster of galaxies. I think it would be fun.

Cool stuff at NextFest: part II: AR on a PDA

2005-07-08T21:55:00.000-05:00

A group from the Vienna University of Technology did some nice Augmented reality stuff using a Dell Axim pocket PC with a tiny little video camera. They had a layout of toy train tracks and when you looked through the PDA you could see a train superimposed on the tracks. You could also control the switches with the pen as could another person who had the second PDA. If you didn't switch properly two of the trains would crash -> they always crashed for me.

Surrounding the tracks were big black and white tokens (the standard ones from the ARToolkit). The developers said that they needed to be big because the resolution of the little camera was so low, and they needed a lot so that you would always have three in the field of view (although it seems to me that you should be able to work off of one). It worked pretty well, if you moved too fast there were problems though.

I could imagine using this in the cosmology gallery for a video version of our audio tours - "virtual" scientists would pop up in the exhibits and tell you about them.

Cool stuff at NextFest part I: Lumisight Table

2005-07-07T18:31:00.000-05:00

Wired magazine's NextFest at Navy Pier was a lot of fun. There were so many cool things, and I got tons of ideas for the Planetarium and the new cosmology gallery that we are planning. So before I forget them, I thought I'd start blogging about some of the things that I thought might work in exhibits at Adler.

The Lumisight Table has a special surface that allows people at each of its four sides to recieve a different view. It works using Lumisity Film. The app. I'm imagining for this is one where you can select different galaxies and then walk around the table to view them in different wavelengths. There is a wonderfully magic effect when it switches from one view to another.

The app. they were running when I was there was poker - you could see your cards, but not those of the other three players - cute.

Back on the Blog Wagon

2005-06-27T21:07:00.000-05:00

I've taken a bit of a hiatus whileI was at the SDSS collaboration meeting in Portsmouth etc. My presentation was well received even though it was thrown together at the last minute. Did do some some blog stuff though - helped my Dad start a blog for the cookbook he is working on.

Astro Viz Workshop webpage is up

2005-06-09T21:38:00.000-05:00

I've put up a webpage from the Astro Viz workshop I posted about a week ago. You can find the page here.

Here is a picture taken in CyberSpace while the workshop was going on(courtesy of Curtis Wong)

Top five "out there" robot ideas

2005-06-07T20:35:00.000-05:00

Robotics is a field on the verge of taking off. The first commercial robots are in people's homes (we love our Roomba), and there are all kinds of wild ideas out there for what robots can do. So inspired by the "roachbot" in today's Science Times here are the top 5 "out there" robot ideas:
5. The Roachbot: Basically a car which is controlled by a poor little coachroach atop a ping pong ball.

4. The intestine crawler: This 6-legged robot disigned at Carnagie Mellon's nanorobotics lab will crawl around your small intestines snapping pictures as it goes.

3. Reproducing Robots: This robot can copy itself - sort of.

2. The SlugBot: The SlugBot gets its energy by hunting its food (slugs) and digesting them.

1. The ShapeShifter: I coach a First Lego League Robotics team and my kids really like the idea of the TETwalker a tetrahedral robot that walks by shortening two of its lengths and falling over. I'm going to see if we can build one out of Mindstorms. Anyway NASA has ideas about connecting together several of these tet structures to create a shapeshifting swarm. Here is a paragraph from their press release:

These miniature TETwalkers, when joined together in "swarms," will have great advantages over current systems. The swarm has abundant flexibility so it can change its shape to accomplish highly diverse goals. For example, while traveling through a planet's atmosphere, the swarm might flatten itself to form an aerodynamic shield. Upon landing, it can shift its shape to form a snake-like swarm and slither away over difficult terrain. If it finds something interesting, it can grow an antenna and transmit data to Earth. Highly-collapsible material can also be strung between nodes for temperature control or to create a deployable solar sail.

Finding Comets

2005-06-05T09:14:00.000-05:00

As part of my duties for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, I check all the spectra we take which the software is not able to identify. Some times this is because the object we imaged is no longer there. Satelite trails, asteroids, supernovae and comets all fall in this class. A few weeks back I got an email from Mike Solontoi from the University of Washington who was compiling a list of all the comets imaged by the SDSS; so far he had compiled a list of 11 found using 4 different techniques. I only had notes I was able to find on 1 big one I stumbled across recently (older notes were lost in an email crash). To find more I performed a skyserver query to look for galaxy targets whose spectra were unidentified and had very low signal to noise. This provided 5 more, the first four of which were on Mike's list (as was the bright one I had notes on), I'm haven't heard back from him on the 5th, but I'm hoping it's a new one. By that I mean new for him, all 6 on my list turn out to be known comets. You can check out the list here.

Podcasts I'm listening to

2005-06-04T18:22:00.000-05:00

Here are the ones I'm suscribed to: ratings out of four stars

Slacker Astronomy(****): My favorite - these guys are really funny. Ad Pamela's voice, well...

One World Expedition(***): These guys phone in every day from their mission to cross the Artic this summer. It's really compelling stuff. One was about how they can't find where they packed the bullets, and the polar bear that has been following them.

Planetary Radio(***): A podcast of the Planetary Society's radio show, high production value and good interviews.

Universe Today(**): Phone interviews with astronomers on recent disoveries. The production value is low but improving, and the science is good.

Science@NASA(**): This was actully the top rated podcast in Febuary.

Living on Earth(**): The radio show. I'm listening to this to prepare for the series of forums on climate change that we just received a NASA grant to put on (I'll blog more about this later). But the 1 hour shows are really too long for me to listen to on the train.

Make Zine Podcast(***): A really nice podcast about fun tech stuff. Robots, hacking, reviews of consumer electronic etc.

Using NASA RSS feeds in the CyberSpace gallery

2005-06-03T21:05:00.000-05:00

OK, I'm cheating a bit but I'm coping this post from my other blog which talks about whats going on in Adler's CyberSpace gallery. Since this article was posted Thom has started working on a more sophistiated version of my program which will check the feed and download the images every night and load them into a MySQL datbase. A script would then query the database and create files for the Macromdia Director sideshow. Anyway, here is the post:

NASA is doing a feature story on their website about our use of their RSS feeds! The story is at http://www.nasa.gov/news/special/Adler_Planetarium.html.
It's really hard to try and keep the gallery current with more than 20 different displays, so using RSS seemed like a great solution. Turns out that it was pretty easy to parse the xml in Macromedia Director (at least once I stopped trying to use their xml parser and just wrote my own). The first thing I tried was just making a slideshow of the NASA image of the day feed. It worked pretty well, but the images it linked weren't high enough resolution to use in the gallery. I sent an email to Colin Engar at NASA about this and he was nice enough to set up a special feed with links to hi-res images. Three months later and it's finally up in the gallery. Right now we have two displays taking information from RSS feeds, and I hope we can add a couple of more soon. There is the image of the Day one which loops through the last five NASA images of the day, and our new intro screen which runs the "breaking news" feed as a ticker across the bottom.

The supernova has a name

2005-05-30T23:14:00.000-05:00

Hey remember the supernova post I started his blog with, well it now has an official designation: 2005ca - recent SN discoveries are posted here.

The Visualization of Astrophysical Data

2005-05-30T21:59:00.000-05:00

Wednesday-Friday of last week we hosted a Visualization of Astrophysical Data workshop at KICP and Adler. I had hoped to blog each night, but I was spent after the long days. Anyway I've rested up this weekend and can start filling you in. The workshop went really well, all the feedback I've gotten has been glowing. We had an interesting mix of people: scientists, graphics people, programmers, museum people and educators (with most people fitting in at least 3 of those catagories).

Some of the highlights:
Andrew Hamilton from the University of Colorado showed off his Black Hole Flight Simulator - really cool. Everyone always asks what goes on inside a black hole, and now you can find out. When you fly through a charged black hole (we don't expect black holes to be charged, but charged black holes behave very much like rotating black holes - and we do expect black holes to be rotating) then after you pass through the event horizon you pass through a wormhole out a white hole and into another universe -wild stuff. As you fall into the black hole you pass through a point where light has piled up, and you can view the entire history of the universe in one blinding flash (Andrew put a cool shimmering visual effert here). Creating the simulator presented some serious viz challenges. OpenGL, DirextX, or whatever, all assume that we are in Euclidian space. To create the BHFS, Andrew has to do the general relativistic ray tracing at each time step. When he was at the Univerity of Chicago six months ago, the simulator kept crashing his laptop-- now he had this giant AlienWare laptop and it ran really smoothly.

Mark Whittle presented his work on Big Bang Acoustics. All the structure in the universe was started by sound waves in the aftermath of the Big Bang. Mark has transcribed those sounds up 50 octaves so that they are in the range of human hearing. Check out his site to hear them.

Curtis Wong from Microsoft gave an insightfull talk on the role of context and narrative. He has always been interested in doing a project on Astronomy, so hopefully the workshop gave him some ideas. One thing he showed which impressed everybody was the Leonardo da Vinci CDRom he worked on at Corbis. It is currently out of print, copies are going for more than $100 on eBay.

Frank Summers talked about Scientific Visualization using Hollywood tools. He told us how he used Maya and Shake to create an IMAX short for the Space Telescope Science Institute.

John Dubinski was inspired by our GeoWall demonstration and rendered out a version of his Milky Way Andromeda collision simulation in stereo. At the end of the day Thursday we hung out in Adler's 3D theater and watched it. John seemed really convinced about the value of watching the animations stereoscopically.

Chris Mihos showed some of his viz work on galaxy collisions. One thing that I really like, and we talked about adapting for Adler, is his Galaxy Crash applet. He also shared an anecdote where the viz led to new scienific understanding (the offset of gas and stars in interacting galaxies). We all decided that collecting these anecdotes is important since much of the scientific community still is not convinced of the value of visualization.

Well there were many more highlights, but I'll stop here for now. I'm helping with putting together the website for the workshop, and one thing I plan to include is a videocast with some of the clips that have been donated. I'll blog again when it's up.

Panoramas on the PSP

2005-05-22T22:56:00.000-05:00

Playing aroung with the PSP, I noticed that the image panning feature works pretty well. If the image is zoomed larger than the screen size then you can move the analog stick to pan across the image. While you are panning it shows a little graphic showing the whole image and a box denotng the part you're looking at(even a nice little showdow around the finder graphic to pop it out). Once you stop panning this graphic disappears - it really well done. For me the panning feature works best when you're constrained in one dimension, otherwise it can be a bit disorienting. So I put together some Astronomy images that fit the bill and added them to the Cosmus PSP site. First a set of all 10 ull color 360 panoramas from the MER rovers, and then another set of 10 from the Multiwavelength MilkyWay poster. When you load the images up the PSP scales them to fit the screen, you need to zoom up to 100% and then pan with the analog stick. It works pretty well as a psuedo-qtvr, the only drawback is that the quality level is quite low while panning.

A new way to do 3D

2005-05-20T22:36:00.000-05:00

Most of my visualization work the last few years has been for passive stereo displays: the Adler 3D theater, the U of C geowall, SciTech's VR exhibit. All of these work with dual projectors, a silver screen and polarized filters and glasses. We use linearly polarized glasses which can cause a problem it you tilt your head, the EVL folks prefer circular for that reason, but circular only really works at one wavelength, and there is some leakage at the surrounding colors. Anyway one of the guys coming to our Visualization of Astrophysical Data workshop, Toshi Takahei from the Riken Institute in Tokyo is bringing a new solution - Infitec glasses and filters. These work kind of like the red and blue glasses but with much more precision. The red, green and blue parts of the spectrum are each cut in two, half of each going to the left eye and the other half to the right. The big advantage is that you no longer need a special screen. Toshi is interested in projecting this on a planetarium dome to create the first stereoscopic planetarium. Anyway I'm looking forward to seeing how well they work, the only drawback is the high price of the glasses ~$500.

A rocket on the street

2005-05-19T19:54:00.000-05:00

Yesterday on my way to the Machine Learning Summer School I came across a rocket parked outside - weird. Then on a break between lectures I stumbled into their press conference. It was the the X-prize team "Canadian Arrow". They are starting a company to offer sub orbital flights that will splash down into the great lakes. They were in town because they are partnerning with a Chicago businessman/polititan Chirnjeev Kathuria. So they came down to International House at UofC with one of their rockets in tow.
Afterwards I had a short conversation with PlanetSpace's president Geoff Sheerin - interesting guy. He got excited when I heard I was an astronomer. He suggested we think about what kinds of observations we could make with an instrument in the nose cone (4 minutes in space). He also was interested in speaking at Adler sometime. Finally he pitched a vision for me where Project Space had a barge just offshore downtown Chicago (or Meigs field perhaps) where they would launch the rockets carrying passengers and Adler designed scientific instruments and then splash down in Lake Michigan. It's a brave new world.
Anyway, it's not everyday you see a rocket parallel parked on 59th st. (although come to think of it I have seen some strange things there: mideval sword battles, Korean drumming, pow wows...)

PSP

2005-05-16T21:06:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago I starting playing around with creating science content for the PSP (playstation portable). Its really a fantastic device, absolutely beautifully designed. Almost an ideal portable media player, with two main drawbacks: the flash memory is really too small to store much in the way in video or sound, and infuratingly Sony purposly limited the video playback off the memory card to half resolution. Anyway I put together something for the cosmus site. Right now there are just some photo folders and our "Mapping the Universe" video. The PSP is really great for browsing images (using the L and R buttons). I'm thinking about replacing the photo essays with something more like magazine articles. Once we get a full suite of content I'd love to mount a couple of these in CyberSpace.

I discovered a new supernova today

2005-05-13T23:00:00.000-05:00

One of the things I do each morning is to check for new supernova canidates from the SDSS spectra. As the galaxy spectra come in we have automated code which checks to see if there is evidence of a supernova on top of the normal galaxy spectrum. Most of these canidates turn out to be false alarms, but a few ike the one this morning turns out to be real. I sent an email to the Central Bureau of Astronomical Telegram informig them of the discovery. Once the SN receives an official desigation I'll post it in this blog. This one was a type Ia observed about 8 days after maximum light. You can follow along with the supernova search here.