Marilyn's Photos - June 24 2025 - Pictures of the Universe

 

The world's largest digital camera - what does that mean?  "In just a few hours of test runs, the observatory recorded millions of galaxies, thousands of asteroids, and cosmic phenomena we’ve never seen before. Perched in the Chilean Andes, Rubin will scan the entire Southern sky every few nights, helping scientists unlock the mysteries of dark matter, dark energy, and planetary defense. It’s a breathtaking scientific leap—and the camera at its heart is a true marvel." Here's the video from SciTechDaily.  I don't have a grasp of 10 million galaxies or of the 20 billion galaxies the Rubin Observatory will capture during its 10--year survey of space and time.  And this is the picture in the article - it combines 678 images.  So you can imagine how excited astronomers are.  The NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory will capture more information about our universe than all optical telescopes throughout history combined.   The telescope is finding never-before-seen asteroids.  There's a demonstration in a short video of how much brighter the results are.  This is their demonstration photo below. How big is the data avalanche to come?  They will generate 20 terabytes of data per night.  The catalog database is 15 petabytes, and in 10 years, there will be around 500 petabytes.  There will be billions of objects and trillions of measurements.  Were you asking the question I was?  What is a petabyte?  It is 1,024 terabytes.   And you knew that a terabyte was 1 trillion bytes.   Given this exciting adventure, it is time we learned the "Byte Chart" Let's start at the story of storage:  "640 kilobytes ought to be enough for anyone" said Bill Gates in the mid-80s.  That was the general consensus of mathematicians.  As an information retrieval professional with library training, I thought that was a strange thing to say then.  I even thought it was dumb.  These were mathematicians and not librarians saying these things.  Maybe they never went into their libraries, storing up to hundreds of thousands of books.   So here we are now with computer technology storage units of measurement based on the byte:   Name Equal To Size (In Bytes) 1 Bit 1/8 Byte 1 Nibble 4 Bits 1/2 Byte (rare) Byte 8 Bits 1 Kilobyte 1,024 Bytes 1,024 Megabyte 1,024 Kilobytes 1,048,576 Gigabyte 1,024 Megabytes 1,073,741,824 Terabyte 1,024 Gigabytes 1,099,511,627,776 Petabyte 1,024 Terabytes 1,125,899,906,842,624 Exabyte 1,024 Petabytes 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 Zettabyte 1,024 Exabytes 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 Yottabyte 1,024 Zettabytes 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 Isn't that such a lovely chart!  And where can the pictures of the universe take us?

I go to an information watercolour class each Monday.  Yesterday were were to make a floral design.

Then I did some "splots" in pastel colours, put them through the Flaming Pear Flexifly filter to get the abstract below.   Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Feb 16 2025 - Let the Blizzard Begin

 

There's a tiny moment between 5:45 and 7:00 where there isn't a forecast.  Starting at 7:00am it is snow, snow, heavy snow. Well, actually, the forecast says "blizzard".  Look at the radar - so many colours of blue, then there's green and red. Red is for ice.   So it is blizzard until 1:00pm today when it becomes snow again.  It moves to light snow, then snow, then scattered flurries, then blowing snow. We're starting to move into Monday morning with a mix of sun and clouds - rise and shine it is 7:00am and your holiday weekend has been a long weekend forced to stay-at-home - a "Snoliday."   And what is a blizzard?  Three components are necessary - "high winds at least 40 km/h, visibility less than 400 meters and lasting for 4 hours.  That's the Canadian definition. And if we get a ground blizzard?   "Another type of winter storm is called a ground blizzard. This is when gusty winds—often 50 to 60 miles an hour—lift up snow that's already on the ground. Both types of blizzards can cause whiteouts, a condition in which so much snow is blowing so fast that it's hard to see anything." The worst blizzards in history were in Iran in 1872 and in Afghanistan in 2008.  Iran's was the deadliest blizzard in recorded history and dropped as much as 26 feet of snow, completely covering 200 villages. The Storm of the Century was in 1993 in the U.S. Toronto's great snow storm of 1999 is not covered in Wikipedia.  It is remembered for bringing out the military to clear the streets.

A watercolour abstract today. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Water Colours

Water is a great subject.  There are so many possibilities.  This one was found at the Monterey Aquarium in the shore birds display area, and was done with a bit of motion blur.

Dual Dating

I had never considered converting calendars.  It is called Dual Dating.  I looked at Wikipedia's events for August 3rd and it is the 215th day of the year (216 in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar.  Then it lists events starting with the year 8 when Tiberius defeats the Dalmatae on the river Bathinus.  So if the Gregorian calendar began in 1582, I wonder how they did all these backward calculations.  I expect it was monks in Monasteries. "The original goal of the Gregorian calendar was to change the date of Easter. In 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII introduced his Gregorian calendar, Europe adhered to the Julian calendar, first implemented by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C." There's a site on the topic of dual dating between various Calendars.  It's at: http://www.adamsonancestry.com/calendar/ We were in Niagara-on-the-Lake yesterday and saluted the bronze statue of Lord Simcoe on his celebration weekend.