The Prestidigitator

Update: We live to die another day.

The LHC gets switched on in a few hours and contrary to what lunatics may want you to believe, the world will not be swallowed by a black hole. What interests me more is as to what *will* actually come out of this 6 billion dollar science experiment. Will they find the Higgs boson? Or will Hawking win that wager?

In Carl Sagan’s Contact, governments cooperate to build this giant dodecahedron (after receiving step by step instructions from a very ambiguous extra-terrestrial intelligence). After spending trillions of dollars on a project that many believed would shape humanity’s future, remember what happened?

Nothing.

Despite being mathematically challenged, I’ve always been quite the (amateur) astronomy/astrophysics enthusiast. So imagine my curiosity with all the hype surrounding Microsoft’s upcoming initiative, the WorldWide Telescope. But having recently moved to Linux, I had to find open source alternatives.

And, I’ve found (ok, so finding in this day and age is a tad bit overrated) a couple of really good open source sky mapping programs:

1. Stellarium: This is a planetarium software which means you’ll have a pretty much earth bound perspective of the night sky. Excluding additional plugins or data files, there’s a massive catalogue of over 600,000 stars and a pretty huge number of nebulae as well. The visualization is extremely cool with near realistic depictions of atmospheric conditions and light. For a given point on earth, you can choose how fast time passes, thereby being able to view the night sky in time lapse. I spent close to 4 hours last night trying to figure out the stuff I could do with this brilliant piece of software.

2. Celestia: While Stellarium is the equivalent of gazing at the night sky, Celestia is akin to travelling through space; delivering images of what stars, planets and galaxies would look like up close. The basic program consists of a catalogue of 120,000 stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue. Using key board or mouse controls you can basically travel through the universe (limited by available data) at speeds ranging from 0.001m/s to light years/s. Celestia is a very power and bandwidth hungry software, so I would suggest Stellarium to get a hang of things initially.

Frankly, there’s nothing that puts things into perspective like marveling at the sheer magnitude of the universe and nothing…nothing comes close to the realization that we’re a generation lucky enough to be alive during a time like this; a time when everything seems possible.

Links:

• Stellarium User Guide
• What Made Me Cry: Microsoft’s WWT [From Scoble's Blog]
• Stellarium screenshot from here