The Outsider's Inside View post#004 - Reverse and Rotate

Things are going fine in my corner of the SETI@home world. I have 83 SETHI cubes completed, leaving 61 more to go to cover the region sampled for the project. I just figured out how to make mpeg movies of my datacubes, so if you want to see something cool then download this HI movie. It's a "mosaic" of about 15 individual datacubes, stitched together to give a wider view of the sky. There's no coordinates but this is looking toward the Galactic Plane, away from the Galactic Center (ie. the anticenter). As the movie plays, you are seeing gas at progressively more positive radial velocities. It took a while to figure out how to give it colour, and IDL tends to write images upside down so it was a bit tricky to vertically "flip" the image. These movies are going to be great for my upcoming seminar down the hill in the astronomy department.

I was late getting to the SETI@home group meeting this afternoon, but I don't think I missed anything crucial. Nothing terribly exciting to report. We talked a bit about being able to accept PayPal donations, the datastream from Arecibo, databases, systems, planned outages and upgrades, the usual. There is an as-yet unsolved mystery with the data in the beta project - something about triplets that shouldn't be there and such. That's why it's in beta, I guess. Dan did tell us a cool story about a very powerful supercomputer being built by SUN in Texas. I can't remember the specifics but it would be a PetaOp machine, something that would be great for the next generation of radio telescopes like the Allen Telescope Array and the Square Kilometre Array.

My prediction for tonight's lone NHL game: Detroit 8, Philadelphia 2. I sure miss Hockey Night in Canada, but NBC and VS aren't doing too bad a job, and locally they show a lot of Sharks games on FSN Bay Area.

What else? The Police looked pretty good at the Grammies last night. I'd probably rather see the reunited Genesis instead, even though they probably won't play enough of their Hackett-era material.

Thank you for sharing that video. It was.... interesting! 8-)

Are the colors any indication of temperature? If so, I saw some white in the very center, so I would presume this is very hot stuff, which is kind of interesting since space itself is so cold.
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What else? The Police looked pretty good at the Grammies last night. I'd probably rather see the reunited Genesis instead, even though they probably won't play enough of their Hackett-era material.

I got excited for a minute, I thought you meant Gabriel, Banks, and Rutherford. Don't like Phil.

What else? The Police looked pretty good at the Grammies last night. I'd probably rather see the reunited Genesis instead, even though they probably won't play enough of their Hackett-era material.

Let alone their Gabriel-era material, I bet … I start to lose interest from the point he left the group, but I’ll listen to Wind and Wuthering happily enough. OTOH Foxtrot is another one of those desert-island albums for me—and there’s even a quite topical song on it, “Watcher of the Skies”.

Thank you for sharing that video. It was.... interesting! 8-)

Are the colors any indication of temperature? If so, I saw some white in the very center, so I would presume this is very hot stuff, which is kind of interesting since space itself is so cold.

There's a long-winded answer to this, but I'll try my best to spare you. Basically the colours reflect the intensity scale, which is measured in units of temperature (Kelvin scale). The "warmest" gas, ie. the white pixels in the movie, has a brightness temperature of about 130 K. That's around -240 Celcius, so it's still quite cold gas. But the brightness temperature is also a measure of how much gas is there too, not just its physical temperature. So that's my explanation, without invoking radiative transfer theory.

@ Kevin - Sir, my Question would be as Follows - "Would you prefer my NOT commenting @ all - in your Threads"...
With Respect and Consideration,
richard w lubrich jr - @ SETI / BOINC since February 29 2000

The link you provided to the Koenjihyakkei webspace at Skin Graft records has me even more excited about hopefully seeing them when they come to North America. I've seen their drummer play live before, in a bass-drums duo called Ruins, and he's the most astounding drummer I've ever seen. Their Chicago show is with a band called Cheer Accident, of whom Matt has given his endorsement, and I really like what I've heard of them so far (the album Matt let me borrow).

Cheer Accident is wonderful. I had the great pleasure of sharing a bill with them last time I was in Chicago then going out for some very-late-night diner food and discussing Gentle Giant. I didn't quite see any info about them playing in Chicago with Koenji (who are also wonderful). Is there a tour schedule somewhere?

- Matt

It's a gorgeous day in the Bay Area, yet I decided to come in to work and see if I can't help my SETHI jobs on sidious finish before the end of this long weekend. In a couple hours they're going to be launching the THEMIS satellites, so I'm going to tune in to NASA TV to check that out. It's a project led by people here at the Space Sciences Lab, with a large group of partners at the University of Calgary, where I got my PhD. The Canadian project scientist taught me StatMech.

I made quite a bit of progress this past week, I think. I figured out how to combine images from this dataset I have of dust emission (from the IRAS satellite launched way back in 1983), so now I can make equal-size maps of HI and dust emission to do direct comparisons of interstellar gas and dust. This is a good way to investigate whether dust and gas are well-mixed, or if there are regions where one is more prevalent than the other. This will be great for both my SETHI and GALFA-HI projects. I've already started the analysis, so I can't wait to see what kind of results I get. I'll put some pictures up in my post next week - I have to start preparing content for my seminar next month anyway.

I heard Brendan Shanahan got injured in a Rangers game today. Hockey's a rough game sometimes. It's been rough watching San Jose get shut out two games in a row.