News You Can Bruise

This year I spent some time doing the pleasant part of botmaking (ideation, data gathering) without the boring part (handling dozens of edge cases, signing up for accounts). One of the bots I never completed was "Cassini GIFs".

All the photos taken by the Cassini probe are online, and each photo has associated metadata. By looking for photos taken by the same instrument at evenly spaced times, you can find frames that would look good as an animation. Here's a nice example: a "movie" of Saturn's moon Dione taken on November 1, 2011:

It was really fun to make these animations that probably only a few people before me had seen. And the fun doesn't need to stop at Saturn: the SETI Project's OPUS3 has aggregated imagery from across NASA's outer planet missions.

The bad news for anyone else who wants to try this out is that the Cassini data is huge. You can download individual frames pretty easily, but the metadata is bundled in enormous tarballs and stored in an ad hoc 1990s file format. To provide a booster seat for the future, I converted the metadata into NDJSON format and put it up as cassini-metadata. Here's one more GIF to whet your interest: Saturn's rings on July 15, 2014:

To celebrate the anniversary of the first moon landing, I packaged up a project I came up with a while back: Apo11o ll, a generative piece that performs Queneau assembly on the Apollo 11 transcripts (from The Apollo 11 Flight Journal and The Apollo 11 Surface Journal).

Duke: Rog. [Long pause.]

Armstrong: That's one small step for (a) man; one giant leap for mankind.

McCandless: Roger, 11. I have a T13 update for you. AOS Tananarive at 37:04, Simplex Alpha. Readback. If you want to go that way, crank it up, and then you can drive it around and look where you want. Over. 11, this is Houston. And we copy the V_I.

Aldrin: Does it look to you like the [garble] the right way? Yes, they were working out - this elaborate scheme.

Collins: Unless you'd rather sleep up top, Buzz; I like - you guys ought to get a good night's sleep, going in that damn LM - How about - which would you prefer? I say the leak check is complete, and I'm proceeding with opening the hatch dump valve.

Aldrin: That enough?

McCandless: Apollo 11, this is Houston at 1 minute. Over.

First Mashteroids and now this? How am I doing all this Queneau space-magic? The answer is simple: Olipy, my library for artistic text generation (focusing on Queneau assembly, because it's the best). Check it out of Github and you'll have everything you need to create home versions of many of my works. It's like my own personal Boîte-en-valise! Want to create something new? Just grab some data and feed it to an Assembler class.

Another bit from New Cosmic Horizons: Space Astronomy from the V2 to the Hubble Space Telescope, this time about the Hubble Space Telescope itself (née the Large Space Telescope):

[F]urther budgetary problems forced NASA to reduce the mirror diameter of the LST from 3.0 m to 2.4 m, saving an estimated $61m in 1975 dollars. Later in 1975 the Large Space Telescope's name was changed to Space Telescope, so as to avoid giving Congress and the tax payers the impression that NASA were being greedy in asking for anything 'large' during a time of financial stringency in the USA. Some astronomers were concerned that this change in name signaled that NASA were eventually going to cut its diameter even more to 1.8 m, which George Low, NASA's deputy administrator, assured them was not the case.

It did launch with the 2.4-meter mirror.