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The internet is full of astonishing videos, pictures and articles but the noise-to-signal ratio can be boringly high. So, from now on, I’ll be regularly collecting five of the best texts, movies and images, old and new, on a variety of subjects.
This time: astronomy. Next time: dancing.
1. Scale by Brad Goodspeed
How big would the other planets look if they orbited the earth at the same distance — 380,000km — that the moon does? Brad Goodspeed’s visualisation will show you. Watch out for Jupiter, which is intimidatingly vast.
2. Bill O’Reilly doesn’t understand the moon
While we’re talking about the moon, it turns out that Bill O’Reilly doesn’t know how it works — which is why he believes in God. “How did the moon get there?” he asks. “How come we have that, and Mars doesn’t?” As I think Jon Stewart pointed out recently, O’Reilly seems to believe that if he doesn’t understand a given concept, no one does. (By the way, Bill, National Geographic has the answer here.)
File this under “Eek”. The French photographer Thierry Legault took a photo of the International Space Station passing in front of the sun. A humbling reminder that even our most cutting-edge technology is pretty small beer on the cosmic scale.
Oh, and if you want to see what the astronauts on the ISS are looking at right now, you can do that at the Nasa website here.
4. Nasa’s astronomy picture of the day
Always beautiful, often mind-boggling, these photos have recently included the cracked surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa, the deep-space contortions of the Seagull Nebula and gorgeous skies over Libya and Stockholm. Look out, too, for the amazing video of the Peerskill meteor of 1992, which, despite being only the size of a bowling ball, was brighter than a full moon as it screamed towards earth.
5. “Pale Blue Dot” by Carl Sagan
My final pick is a personal one: Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot”. We had this as a reading at our wedding, because its both humbling and hopeful. Starting with a photo of earth taken in 1990 by Voyager 1 from the edge of the solar system — 3,781,782,502 miles away — the great science educator reflects on our responsibility to care for that “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam . . . the only home we’ve ever known”. If you don’t feel a little prickle in your tearducts by the end, you have no soul.
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