Sunday, April 12, 2009

Starscaping


Hoo boy, you are ska-ROOOOD! Because it's either the morning, and you need to get to work, or you're at work, or it's the evening and you need to do chores/spend time with your family/stalk people online, and here I am pointing you toward the Star Formation game, which in its addictiveness makes the infamous Falling Sand game look like eating your boogers in public (i.e., pathetically easy to kick...not that that's an actual habit anyone would ever need to break...no sirree, just trying to turn a humble phrase here...).

They could have called this Herding Hydrogen. Theoretically, you set off supernovae to compress clouds of interstellar gas so that they become gravitationally bound and collapse into massive short-lived stars which themselves go supernova. Basically though, you Nuke Stuff until it glows, and then it goes BOOM and Nukes other Stuff and the eternal cycle of Blowing Stuff Up rolls on. I submit that this is scientific evidence that the Creator exists and that He is a dude.


In not-completely-unrelated news, last night I got curious about what would happen if I held my camcorder--literally the cheapest commercially available model--up to the eyepiece of my thermos-sized telescope. The answer is that I got something that is pretty crap on any objective scale, but at least recognizable and therefore a smashing success personally. I'm posting this not to brag--oh hay-ull no--but as a reminder that the night sky is accessible even to those of modest means.

Clear skies!

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2 Comments:

Blogger Andy said...

Wow, you weren't kidding about the time sink this thing would become! It's just a little too much fun. . .I remember this software that was a galaxy simulation (it came out about 10 or 15 years ago), where you had a couple of galaxies that interacted gravitationally, and they could merge to form clusters or whip past each other to fling entire solar systems into the voids of the universe. Playing God is awesome.

9:04 PM  
Blogger Vultur said...

Very fun game, thanks!

That photo looks just about like Saturn looks when I've seen it through a birdwatching spotting scope.

12:47 AM  

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