Up next: Moon, Jupiter and Venus

On the 5th of Feb I'd been to Opeth concert at Palace Grounds in Bangalore. The stage was setup really well. I was all kinds of high and ready to get my mind blown by Opeth. But just at the dawn of the concert I looked up at the darkening sky and I could see Venus, Jupiter and Moon line up with the stage. It was a wonderful cosmic scene. The first image shows this view.

I went back home to trace the paths of these planets to see if the alignment gets any better to see through the naked eye and guess what... it does. In the coming few days Im expecting to see some awesome alignments. Without a telescope, this is a pretty pleasing sight to the naked eye.

Feb 5th 2012

Feb 26th 2012

Mar 14th 2012

In the second image, I also think Mercury is visible under the triangular alignment of Jupiter, Moon and Venus. By the time we reach the 3rd image, I think Mercury would have started its retrograde motion and gone back down towards the horizon and won't be visible properly. I should check my ephemeris data.

Apart from these, there are some pretty awesome things to look at right now. The night sky is filled with the cool stuff on the far side of the milky way.

• Firstly the Great Nebula in Orion's sword. 
• Secondly, Pleides (and Haydes also, but we'll only see Aldeberan from the polluted skies of most Indian cities)
• There also are the cool constellation along the Orion arm of the milky way with some of the brightest stars in the sky - Cassiopeia, Perseus (Algol), Auriga (Capella), Taurus (Aldebran), Gemini (Castor, Pollux), Orion (Betelguese, Riegel), Canis Minor (Procyon), Canis Major (Sirius), Carina (Canopus)
• Among the stars visible, Sirius is the brightest star and Canopus is the second brightest

So happy star-gazing. Enjoy the winter sky.

Universe Sandbox

I always kept thinking I should create this application where I can get the current planetary positions in a 3D simulation where I can move around in space and look at each planet and get close to it at which point the experience of using the application gets suspiciously similar to Google earth.

I had once started doing the application to move 9 spheres (this was when Pluto was still a planet) around another giant sphere at a particular angular velocity. Then I started adjusting the size and colors of these spheres to reflect the sizes and the look of actual planets. Finally when all went straight to hell, I gave up. Recently the itch to use an application like this got... scratchy. But this time I just Googled for an application like this and found one of the sweetest 3D simulation of the universe that's out there.

Uranus, the dark ring matter, the tiny moons embedded in the dark ring
matter and the orbits of the big 5 moons: Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel,
Titania and Oberon (As shown by Universe Sandbox)

Its Universe Sandbox! This app does a pretty good simulation of the current positions of planets, stars and nearby galaxies. It simulates the effects of gravity on an object in space extremely well. You can do stuff like: increase the mass of Jupiter to equal Sun and see how the planets start moving in all weird paths due to the increased gravity and you see Sun and Jupiter do the binary dance. Cool app.

Some dude has used this application to simulate the arrival of 'Nibiru' - the ridiculous star made of 'Dark Matter' that is going to 'collide' with the 'Solar System' causing the end of the 'Universe'!!! Some bull theory, but this dude has managed to simulate that using Universe Sandbox. It is quite interesting to look at. This is the YouTube link to the cool looking dumbness.

(I see the scope for a lot more posts while talking about the hype of the world ending in 2012)

The 'God' particle

I recently came across this 'God' particle a.k.a Higgs Boson. The fact that this particle is called the 'God' particle caused my mind to rate its interestingness as 10/10. So I went about reading more about this particle. The best links I found on this particle is this one. The articles in that page attempt to explain what Higgs Boson is in a page. These articles are my read for the day today.