Flashy landing: Shoemaker vs Tempel

I’ve stumbled across a page which compares Comet Shoemaker-Levy-9’s unexpectedly bright (and millions of km early) reaction to Jupiter with Comet Tempel-1 reacting to Deep Impact’s arrival.

Thankfully, the observations include things like Jupiter’s own reactions to SL9 arriving.

Amongst other things, tiny fragments of the comet severely ramped up Jupiter’s auroral activity — and in abnormal areas of Jupiter. Fragment G of SL9 appears to have made a big personal claim-to-fame by smacking into Jupiter’s plasma-sheath (the edge of Jupiter’s magnetosphere) a few million kilometers before phsyical impact with Jupiter’s surface.

A truer feeling for scientific reaction to comets “misbehaving” so obviously can proabably be gleaned from the Sky & Telescope phraseology:

When [SL9] Fragment A hit the giant planet, it threw up a fireball so unexpectedly bright that it seemed to knock the world's astronomical community off its feet

Comments

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

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.

Plantagenet Penguinista

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