So what _else_ is in the frame?

This Astronomy Picture of the Day photo of Plato and surrounds on Luna has three interesting features on it which are not even mentioned (bar one, and that barely) in the accompanying text; use this thumbnail as a key, and open the APOD image in a new window:

plato features

The blue line traces a gully, kinda-sorta, which has its wide end near Plato — that is, uphill — and the skinny end on a lunar mare (plain) — downhill — but perhaps even more interesting is that it is discontinuous. The riddle: How was it made?

There is a similar feature near Aristarchus, called Schroter’s Valley (Valles Schroter) or Schroter’s Rille, and a different-but-intriguing linear rille (that photo was taken by an Apollo astronaut wielding a film camera).

The pink splitpin outlines the amazingly straight lunar Alpine Valley, which (as you can see in this image) also has a wandering, sputtery more-or-less central channel-ish. Why straight? Why does it have a flat “pool” at one end? How did the central channel form?

The yellowish bar highlights what appears to be a ridge thrown up between adjacent craters; does this indicate that they were formed together?

Comments

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...

Plantagenet Penguinista

Search This Blog