Thursday, September 30, 2010

Photographs of the Moon, processed by a New Zealander

(I had accidentally posted this to another blog about open source software)

Maurice Collins, in Palmerston North, reprocessed images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera to produce some stunning photographs.

Unfortunately, he uses somewhat non-standard HTML, so I was unable too look at most of his pages at his website using Firefox.

http://www.universetoday.com/74082/the-moon-in-stunning-wide-angle/
[...]
However, the raw wide-angle images are somewhat distorted by the camera, but Maurice Collins, a Moon enthusiast from New Zealand, found that putting several images together in a mosaic removes a lot of the distortions and produces a much clearer image. The results are nothing short of stunning; here are a few example of Maurice’s handiwork, including this jaw-dropping image of the Marius Hills region of the Moon. Click on any of these images for a larger version on Maurice’s website, Moon Science
[...]

Sunday, September 26, 2010

LHC beautiful diagrams of Quark 'atoms'

In the 6 September 2010: Beautiful atoms entry of the LHCb experiment web site, they have some wonderful diagrams showing how they found 'atoms' of Beauty and anti-Beauty quarks. They show how the experimental results can be mapped to the transitions where the 2 quarks drop from higher to lower energy orbitals, just like as in an Hydrogen atom.

In other news: the actual number of protons in the LHC beam is now about a millions times more than when they started this year!