Gogblog's Monday Video Rewind Picture Show: A Tour of Antarctica

http://www.youtube.com/v/Pfzui39WWT0?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0


Glaciers. . .  snow pack. . . mountains. . . exotic blue ice. . . a continent about the size of the United States and Mexico combined, but with virtually no population. Welcome to Antarctica.

Have you got four and a half minutes? If so, watching this video will be time well spent. Animators at Goddard Space Flight Center created a Ken Burns image flyover on steroids. Slowly you soar over a virtual landscape composed of a thousand individual LandSat satellite images, stitched together seamlessly into the LandSat Image Mosaic of Antarctica, or LIMA.

No need to run on about it. The narrator will fill you in. Relax and observe.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

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Gogblog's Monday video rewind picture show: "Sentinels of the Heliosphere," a detailed look at the fleet of spacecraft that keeps a collective eye on our stormy sun

[Um…. Make that the TUESDAY video rewind picture show. We had a network outage yesterday, so sorry about that. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming. . . ]

Given the recent upturn in stormy solar activity, it seemed a good time to revisit the spectacular piece of visualization known as Sentinels of the Heliosphere. This video debuted in 2009 at SIGGRAPH, an international conference and exhibition on computer graphics and interactive techniques.



http://www.youtube.com/v/AqRQ_93kFKs?fs=1&hl=en_US



_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

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Gogblog Monday Video Rewind Picture Show: Into the chamber of horrors with Goddard engineer Kevin Boyce

http://www.youtube.com/v/HZmICLEXPLc



“Welcome — to NASA’s spacecraft chamber of horrors!”

And so begins a really clever video by Goddard producer Michael D. McClare. It’s  about the nasty-but-necessary things we do to satellites and spacecraft on the ground to make sure they work as planned in space.

We shake them, freeze them, expose them to vacuum, bathe them in radio waves, spin them on a giant centrifuge, and blast them with sound waves. In this video, Goddard engineer Kevin Boyce channels Vincent Price and gives you a tongue-in-cheek tour of the spacecraft test facilities Goddard. You almost expect Boyce to burst out in malevolent chuckling as they strap a big piece of equipment onto a hydraulic stress-testing machine, which Boyce refers to as “the rack.”

Bruhahahahaha!

Download a higher-resolution version of the video to get the full effect of McClare’s excellent work.

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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

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Gogblog Monday Video Rewind Picture Show: A cute satellite + dorky humor = Little SDO

Have you seen Little SDO? It’s a digital character conceived and created by Goddard animator and video producer Chris Smith. Watch the video(s) below and come back if you’re curious…

http://www.youtube.com/v/qB_X-iU1qFc&hl=en_US&fs=1



Ok, here’s the deal. Smith started working for Goddard about 3 years ago. And he started playing around with some open-source animation software called Blender. Not surprising: Smith basically taught himself animation and video editing in high school.

But what to animate? A satellite seemed like a good idea. Goddard has lots of those. We’re virtually a satellite garage of earth-observing, astrophysical, and planet-probing spacecraft. Smith chose the Solar Dynamics Observatory — “SDO” to us satellite geeks.

“When I first started, I was messing around with this 3-D animation program, and I was thinking what would be an interesting satellite to model. I saw that SDO was just coming out. It kind of occurred to me that if you looked at it in a certain way, it looked like it had four little eyes and two wings and the satellite that could be a tail. So I figured if I was going to make this thing, it should be a character rather than just a satellite.”

In short, SDO was anthropomorphable.  Simply meaning it could be made to resemble something human, or at least something birdlike. Something biological and breathing. Something people could connect with on an emotional level.

So Smith made a demo video of him interacting with the character. This was the sort of hey-kids-let’s-put-on-a-show noodling around that often leads to the most innovative media NASA cranks out.

Little SDO scored. “Educators love it,” Smith says. “Kids love it.”

Smith made three “Little SDO” shorts (see below) and an even shorter “Introducing Little SDO” promo (the one at the top of the blog). The first one came out about a year ago, after the launch date for SDO became pretty firm and NASA wanted to create a buzz about the mission.

In case it’s not obvious, that’s Chris Smith in all four videos, playing the hapless human straight man Abbot to Little SDO’s mischievous Lou Costello. (Please tell me there are a few people out there who remember Abbot and Costello!)

People looking for in-depth science might leave the Little SDO experience unsatisfied. But the films serve a different but equally important purpose.

“One of the best ways to hook younger people, especially kids, is through more entertaining things that still get the idea across of what we’re doing,” Smith says.

***READ Discover Magazine blogger Ian O’Neill’s savvy take on Li’l SDO on the Astroengine blog.




http://www.youtube.com/v/UoOppimoi70&hl=en_US&fs=1


http://www.youtube.com/v/YwLcqio-kCs&hl=en_US&fs=1


http://www.youtube.com/v/EPqhLlzZX6I&hl=en_US&fs=1


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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

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