A particularly rare astronomical event – the transit of Venus across the solar disk – will occur on June 8 or about sixteen hours from the time of this posting. Unfortunately (for me) it will not be visible from the western United States, so I won’t get a chance to observe it, but it should be visible from large portions of Europe and the Middle East. If you are lucky enough to be under its shadow, check out this site or this one for information and viewing instructions. I haven’t found any live webcams yet for this event, but when I do I’ll try to post an update below.

The image to the right is a time lapse I did of the November, 1999 transit of Mercury. The entire transit took roughly 45 minutes, and I cut frames from a simple video I did to show it working accross the solar disk. It’s crude, but it works. The Venus transit should take roughly six hours, and Venus will appear significantly larger than tiny Mercury. If you can, get out and observe, but observe with all necessary precautions to your eyesight. You’ll want to use those eyes again, I’m sure.

I’m always interested in bizarre remote control applications, so I was pleased to find this informative paper on the development of the Black Widow Micro Air Vehicle, an RC vehicle with a 6″ wingspan, a range of 1.8 kilometers and a live video transmitter. Nifty and informative.

A recent Slashdot article was a rather dull one about fun things you could do with a large Fresnel lenses. I had seen stuff like this before, but in scanning over the responses as I often do, I found a reference to a patent for a spiral Fresnel reflector. You can review this the patent here. It’s rather clever. Basically you can plot a spiral onto a flat sheet of reflective material, and then wind it around according to a particular formula (equation 2 in the patent) which causes the slats to tilt at the appropriate angle to bring light to the desired focus.

I thought it was a cool idea, I’ll have to work up a program to plot the design for these, and then use it to make an immense solar hot dog cooker. Or something.

Today the DARPA Grand Challenge was run. The course was shortened to only 142 miles from its original design goal of 250 miles. Fifteen robotic teams were selected to run. The best robot made 7.4 miles before mechanical failure called a halt to its day. The majority of teams made it less than a mile.

I don’t know whether to view this as a failure or a success. It seems that cross country navigation in real time is quite difficult: I suspect that even a reasonably inexperienced rally driver could easily drive the course in one third the time required.

Addendum: you can look at the preliminary results which I’ve thoughtfully converted from a silly Microsoft Word file to a somewhat more paleteable (but still proprietary) PDF file.

When I was in at Princeton in the late 80’s, I remember Pat Hanrahan talking about the Visible Human Project, a project to produce detailed 3-D models of both a normal male and female, using CT, NMRI and anatomical images. Yes, anatomical images.
They sliced the male up in 1mm intervals to match the imaging resolution of the CT scans. The female was sliced much thinner, at 0.33mm per slice.

Not content to leave cryosectioning to the trained biologists, numerous amateurs have gotten into the act as well. Witness The Visible Barbie Project.

Well, Marvin didn’t get this one. Yesterday the Spirit rover successfully bounced to a stop on Mars, linked up with JPL and transmitted pictures back to Earth. You can see the first of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Press Release Images. I was hoping for some higher resolution images, which undoubtably will be showing up in the next few days. To all those who were involved in the mission: congratulations! We will be looking forward to the pictures and data you get back.

Addendum: Here’s a link to a
high resolution panorama.

As Mars approaches its closest opposition in something like 80,000 years, International MarsWatch is a great website to track for the latest
images and information about the Red Planet. Their
July images are already pretty arned nifty.

Check back periodically.

The BBC is announcing the discovery of a
squid thought to be larger than any discovered so far. The so-called giant squid or Architeuthis dux may have a mantle which reaches 2.25 meters, but the new squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) had a mantle 2.5 meters in length, and is thought to be a juvenile. Scientists have chosen to dub this new leviathan
"the collossal squid".

I love to watch nature documentaries and the like on PBS, but most of them go over information that has been rehashed a million times. But just when you get complacent, you realize that there are still things out there which are big and yet largely unknown. One of the most unusual is the Oarfish, Regalecus glesne. Besides being huge (reported lengths of 17 meters, verified lengths of 8 meters), the oarfish has a beautiful silvery body and a long thin shape which is very odd.
It has been photographed by Jonathan Bird, and also by Navy divers (who caught it on video!).
I also recall seeing video of a barely alive specimen that washed up on the beach, but wasn’t able to find it online.

On February 12, 1809, Charles Darwin was born. I think a strong argument could be made that Darwin is the most influential scientist of all time. He postulated that the complex biosphere we
observe is the result of understandable physical processes that we can study and observe at work throughout the long history of life on our planet. His contributions formed the basis for all of biology, and his keen insights provided the basis for understanding the nature of life around us.

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Origin of Species, 1859

Oh, and some American president
was born on the same day, but he really is of minor importance compared to Darwin.