astronomy, image, pixel art, science, short, Space, Uncategorized

Pixel Solar System

pixel-solar-system-grid

(Click for full view.)

(Don’t worry. I’ve got one more bit of pixel art on the back burner, and after that, I’ll give it a break for a while.)

This is our solar system. Each pixel represents one astronomical unit, which is the average distance between Earth and Sun: 1 AU, 150 million kilometers, 93.0 million miles, 8 light-minutes and 19 light-seconds, 35,661 United States diameters, 389 times the Earth-Moon distance, or a 326-year road trip, if you drive 12 hours a day every day at roughly highway speed. Each row is 1000 pixels (1000 AU) across, and the slices are stacked so they fit in a reasonably-shaped image.

At the top-left of the image is a yellow dot representing the Sun. Mercury and Venus aren’t visible in this image. The next major body is the blue dot representing the Earth. Next comes a red dot representing Mars. Then Jupiter (peachy orange), Saturn (a salmon-pink color, which is two pixels wide because the difference between Saturn’s closest and furthest distance from the Sun is just about 1 AU), Uranus (cyan, elongated for the same reason), Neptune (deep-blue), Pluto (brick-red, extending slightly within the orbit of Neptune and extending significantly farther out), Sedna (a slightly unpleasant brownish), the Voyager 2 probe (yellow, inside the stripe for Sedna), Planet Nine (purple, if it exists; the orbits are quite approximate and overlap a fair bit with Sedna’s orbit). Then comes the Oort Cloud (light-blue), which extends ridiculously far and may be where some of our comets come from. After a large gap comes Proxima Centauri, the nearest (known) star, in orange. Alpha Centauri (the nearest star system known to host a planet) comes surprisingly far down, in yellow. All told, the image covers just over 5 light-years.

Standard
geology, image, science

Pixel Earth 2

1 Radian Wedge Pixel Art.png

A slightly more comprehensive version of the previous post. Once again, each pixel is 1 kilometer deep. The pixels at sea level (the thin green line near the top) are 1 kilometer wide, corresponding to a total width of 6,371 kilometers at sea level or an angular width of 1 radian, or 57 degrees. There’s an increasing horizontal distortion as you go towards the inner core (orange), which becomes infinite at the very bottom row.

In this picture, you’ll find Krubera Cave, the Burj Khalifa, the Kola Superdeep Borehole, a typical thunderstorm, Mt. Everest, a typical volcano, a subduction zone, an airliner at cruising altitude, and the International Space Station. Try and find them: it’s like a badly-drawn Where’s Waldo!

Standard
geology, image, physics, science, short

Pixel Earth 1

I present you: a scale model of the Earth’s surface, from an altitude of 400 kilometers down to a depth of 300 kilometers. At this scale, every pixel is 1 km by 1 km.crust-1-px-eq-1-km-numbered-large

Legend:

  1. The International Space Station at perigee.
  2. The aurora borealis.
  3. The greatest altitude at which human beings have died: cosmonoauts Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev died just before the reentry of Soyuz 11, when the explosive decoupling of the descent module opened an oxygen seal in the cockpit.
  4. The highest altitude reached by the Air Force’s X-15, which still holds the speed record for a crewed aircraft, and which was among the first crewed vehicles to cross into space.
  5. The official edge of space: the Kármán line, at around 100 kilometers altitude. Above this line, you have to move faster than orbital velocity for wings to provide usable lift, so you might as well just orbit.
  6. The streak denotes the range of altitudes at which meteors glow.
  7. The streak denotes the altitudes at which the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteorite glowed. The starburst denotes the approximate altitude at which it exploded.
  8. The altitude at which the Space Shuttle Columbia stopped sending telemetry and began its final breakup.
  9. On a less sad note: the altitude from which Felix Baumgartner began his famous skydive.
  10. The top of the troposphere (where weather happens); the beginning of the stratosphere; the top of thunderstorms in middle and tropical latitudes.
  11. 10,000 meters: the altitude at which passenger airplanes cruise.
  12. The summit of Mt. Everest.
  13. The Challenger Deep (over 10,000 meters deep).
  14. The deepest active mining operation: 4,000 meters, at the Mpomeng gold mine in South Africa.
  15. The deepest human beings have ever drilled: 12 kilometers at the Kola Superdeep Borehole, in Russia.
  16. The deepest confirmed location in a natural cave: 2 km, in Krubera Cave, in Abkhazia, Georgia (the Eastern European Georgia, not the American one.) The cave very likely goes deeper.
  17. Volcanic magma chambers. Contrary to popular belief, most of the mantle is a plastic solid (like very, very stiff Silly Putty), rather than molten. Magma is the exception. The magma chamber that feeds Hawai’i’s volcanoes is on the shallow end of the spectrum. The magma chamber underneath the Yellowstone Caldera (which provides heat for Yellowstone’s famous geysers) sits at around 25 to 35 kilometers deep. We have actual rough maps of it. It’s awesome.
  18. The Mohorovičić discontinuity (or Moho; no, not the KSP one): the official boundary between crust and mantle. It can be as shallow as 5 kilometers deep (beneath the seafloor) and 90 kilometers deep (under mountains); it averages 35 kilometers deep.
  19. Very deep magma chambers.
  20. The end of the asthenosphere, a region of rock made weak and squishy (relatively speaking) by the enormous temperature and pressure. This starts beneath the solid crust (the lithosphere). Its boundary isn’t well-defined.
  21. A hot plume in the upper mantle. Droplets (well, droplet-sized compared to the whole Earth) of lower-melting-point material rise through the mantle to fill magma chambers.

(I should point out that I’m not a geologist. If I’ve made a mistake, please let me know. You won’t hurt my feelings. I’d rather admit I’m wrong than put out a misleading graphic.)

Standard
image, short, Space

Earth versus Sun

Earth vs Sun at 1 AU.png

Nothing too special here: just a size comparison between the Earth and the Sun. The only difference from the usual ones, is that I’ve based their relative sizes on their angular diameters. For the Sun, I computed the angular diameter at a distance of 1 AU (which is how we see it here on Earth). For the Earth, I computed the angular diameter at a distance of 1 AU minus the diameter of the Sun. In other words, the Earth appears as large as it would if it were sitting at the point on the Solar surface nearest us. This is how the Earth would look as a very unfortunate close-transiting planet.

To paraphrase Carl Sagan: that little blue blob is home. That’s us. Everything that’s ever happened to you happened there.

Now consider that compared to the Sun…

Earth vs Sun Closeup.png

Here’s a closeup of the same image, showing the Earth compared to the weird convection granules on the Sun’s surface.

Both images are from NASA. The Solar image is from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (HMI intensitygram, February 7th, 2016), and the Earth-disk image is from the GOES earth-observing satellite.

Standard