In college, I had an internship at JPL writing software to help collate, transform, and combine pictures of Jupiter, for use with NASA’s JUNO mission.
My coworker and I created a GUI application in IDL (similar to FORTRAN), that would allow the user to open up several images of various wavelengths and combine them into a cylindrical map of the planet, showing its entire surface at a given point in time. After working on this for several months and creating a functional, and actually useful program, we realize that there was a blank space in the toolbar and we had no button that needed to be there. So we put in a button with a cat GIF that literally did nothing. We planned on having it do something jokey, but ran out of time.
I will always remember demoing this to my mentor, basically the world expert on all things Jupiter, showing him what the program did, thus justifying why JPL had spent several thousand dollars to have me as a research fellow. The disappointment in his eyes when he saw that dumb, useless, cat button was priceless.
> In college, I had an internship at JPL writing software to help collate, transform, and combine pictures of Jupiter, for use with NASA’s JUNO mission.
This already sounds incredibly cool. I wish I had had an opportunity like this sometime. Sadly, nothing.
> The disappointment in his eyes when he saw that dumb, useless, cat button was priceless.
Some people tend to have no humour. I think it's hilarious.
>The disappointment in his eyes when he saw that dumb, useless, cat button was priceless.
I once wrote a p2p filesharing app in college for a networking class, and I had put an easter egg in there where if you requested a certain file (lenin.jpg?) it displayed ascii art of a communism meme and started playing a midi of the soviet national anthem.
My little old networking prof sets down to test my program, and of course, that's the file she requested. She slowly turns to me, looks me in the eye and says 'be honest, you spent more time on that than the actual assignment didn't you?' ...'yes'. She shakes her head and mutters 'nerds!' under her breath, lmao
I know grammatically it isn't the most correct, but I don't see anything non-idiomatic about "amount of features".
Reason: "Just the right amount" is a set, idiomatic expression. "Just the right amount of ___" is just extending the expression. IMO extending idiomatic expressions exempts it from a lot of the formal word-pairing conventions in English.
I think amount of is usually used for 'continuous' (I'm not sure on the word) substances like flour, water, or salt, rather than multiples of discreet objects.
I'm guessing that "amount" is not quantized ("number" is). Let me be absolutely clear that most native speakers will not notice the distinction (even pedants like me missed this one).
You'll also see people being pedantic about "less" versus "fewer," e.g. complaining about the "12 items or less" line being improper usage since items are quantized and therefore it should be "12 items or fewer."
It's probably mostly idiomatic. For native English-speakers it is more natural to use "number" when talking about things that are counted units that would be represented by integers (like marbles, or children, or features). "Amount" would be more appropriate when talking about something that you measure and represent with a floating point number (like butter, or gasoline/petrol, or risk). But an English-speaker will understand what you mean if you say "amount of features" instead of "number of features."
And since we're being picky, it should be "the latter is correct", not "the later is correct."
> Ask a nontechnical Windows or Mac user where their files are stored - they have no idea.
This. The move towards “everything on the cloud” was a double edged sword for non-power users. It’s great that you don’t have to make Grandma plug in a external USB drive and use Time Machine, but yes nobody knows where things are anymore. Does Grandma know what “the cloud” even is?
I feel like Apple is the biggest proponent of moving away from the idea of “files” and having your “content” be something you shuttle around between different apps. But each one has a slightly different “share” and “import” and “export” paradigm as well. And now there is an iCloud Drive “files” app! What does that mean? And how do I know if it’s on my phone or I’m just seeing a representation of what’s on my iCloud Drive? Does the cloud icon mean I’ve downloaded it or not, what if it’s it slightly dark gray or slightly light gray? </rant>
It’s amazing that amateur folks can provide this much insight these days. I worked at JPL 10 years ago and setup a pipeline for amateur Jupiter astronomers to get their images to JPL/NASA. Basically JPL figured out that these people were consistently producing such high quality data, that NASA could take advantage of it for the Juno mission. Glad to see this in the news :).
It makes sense seeing that NASA/JPL only have so many instruments pointing at Jupiter at any time. That number is dwarfed by the number of amateurs looking at it on any night. It also helps that it's one of the easiest things to view.
What does one need to look at Jupiter, visible light or not? And how much would it cost to have a setup that I can feed some sky coordinates and enjoy the feed/s on a screen.
Any useful software that also happens to be free and/or open source? I just realized I don't know anything about this fascinating stuff
To capture material similar to TFA, a 5" diameter (127 mm) telescope would do (here perhaps a larger one was used, but in bad seeing conditions [1]), e.g. a cheap $100-$200 Newtonian. Add a reasonable mount (~$400) and a camera (one can start with a converted webcam, or get a dedicated model - typically sporting higher FPS, better sensors, also mono, etc.; those start at $150-$200). A lot of popular software for mount control, video acquisition, image processing is free (and often open-source). The best source of knowledge are astronomy forums, e.g. [2], [3], [4], and country-specific ones.
To see what's possible with amateur-grade equipment, go to AstroBin.com; e.g., Jupiter with 14" telescope:
There's lots of really good options available now at some very affordable prices. There's quite a few reflectors in the 6"-8" size that are very small and easy to set up. Because the planets are so much brighter, especially the moon, than deep sky objects, all of the tracking and image stacking software is not necessary to start. There are scopes now that come with a mobile app and a built in camera.
Because I don't have hands on experience with anything other than my gear, I can't really recommend specific models. Celestron would be a good safe starting point. The magazine/sites from places like Sky&Telescope or BBC Sky at Night, will publish reviews of new gear ranging from "baby's first scope" to as much money as you have.
Probably the best starting scope is a plain Newtonian such as from Skywatcher. They're the cheapest way to get a good large aperture and therefore good resolving power, and you can do a lot with one. If you go enthusiast then it's worth looking at what the advantages of other telescope types are, but I'd advise playing with a Newtonian for a year or two before even thinking about that.
Celestron sell some incredible scopes at incredible prices. But I would be very wary of their lower-end stuff. There's a reason why "Don't buy a powerseeker" is a phrase repeated over and over again to people starting out in this hobby.
My coworker and I created a GUI application in IDL (similar to FORTRAN), that would allow the user to open up several images of various wavelengths and combine them into a cylindrical map of the planet, showing its entire surface at a given point in time. After working on this for several months and creating a functional, and actually useful program, we realize that there was a blank space in the toolbar and we had no button that needed to be there. So we put in a button with a cat GIF that literally did nothing. We planned on having it do something jokey, but ran out of time.
I will always remember demoing this to my mentor, basically the world expert on all things Jupiter, showing him what the program did, thus justifying why JPL had spent several thousand dollars to have me as a research fellow. The disappointment in his eyes when he saw that dumb, useless, cat button was priceless.