Greeblefest

A while back I reported that you can now buy selected renderings via StockTrek images, which has resulted in me dredging up some very old files and dragging them kicking and screaming into whatever decade we call this (the tens ? the twenty-tens ? the twenty-teens ?). While off galivanting around the UK over Christmas I managed to retrieve some missing files from the almost archaic media of CDs (these files are so old that even CD-writers were pretty new and fancy for home tech at the time).

Last time the re-rendering amounted to little more than some basic texturing and lighting adjustments, which is simple enough. That was also the case for Scorpion-class attack cruiser :

Original render (top) and shiny new version (bottom).

The warship dates back to April 2004 and was made for a contest at Scifi-Meshes, taking 4th place. Incidentally it's one of very few absolutely original designs I've made.

The other re-renders are just as old, but were in considerably worse shape. The warship was a single standalone project that took about a month to make, and even back then this allowed for plenty of greebles (small, random details). The satellites from 2001 : A Short Odyssey were made for animation, and although parts of the old models are sufficiently detailed, large parts weren't.

This was driven by two factors : 1) They were part of the classic overly-ambitious crucible of a project that all CG practicioners have to endure, so I didn't want to spend a month on each one; 2) Rendering times had to be kept short with the technology of 2004. Which is not an insignificant difference - multi-core processors were unknown, single-core processors were around the 1 GHz mark, and ray-tracing for free software was pretty much brand spanking new (and so without much in the way of optimisation).

Well, that was then, and this is now. Quad-core processors are the norm, RAM and even GPU memory are measured in gigabytes, ray-tracing has had a decade of refinement, and mesh-modelling tools have improved quite a lot. And, I'd like to think, perhaps I've even learned a thing or two about image composition. For these models, I increased the vertex count by a factor 5-10, so they are essentially entirely new (although some original parts have survived).

The above is apparently the Chinese satellite featured in 2001. In the movie there is a little Chinese logo just about visible, although I didn't bother with it here. The satellites were originally planned to be orbital weapons platforms . There's really no evidence of this in most of their designs though. At worst, the Chinese satellite looks like it might be able to... umm.... gently nudge an enemy ship ? If it was very lucky ?

This one is a German satellite, as evidenced by the German flag and even the Iron Cross. It has some long weapon-like protrusion, although exactly what it is is anyone's guess. I rather liked the look of the original design so I tried to follow it quite closely. I was quite pleased with the way the new model turned out, so I also rendered a short flyby animation. It has a little bit of annoying flickering, which is something I'm still trying to fix.

Then we come to the Franco-Bulgarian satellite (the internet tells me it's French or perhaps Bulgarian, so why not). Reference pictures for this were were confusing. Other people's models give it a quite different appearance to mine but I liked my original interpretation well enough.

And finally we come to the other satellite, the first one in Kubrick's movie, which is apparently American. I think because at the time, I hadn't ready access to such a nice reference picture, my interpretation came out radically different to the original. Never mind. I think this one came out nicely enough, though I didn't both with a wallpaper image. It seems I really went to town on the greebles on this one, with the upper part of the ship being virtually unchanged in the re-render.

I said finally, didn't I ? I lied. I also decided to render a flyby of all four satellites. Actually, this is just a test. I've got this crazy notion running around in my head that I should do something like this but with all of my spaceships, from the last ten years of modelling. So while this one has only rudimentary camera work and lighting, the finished product will be better.

The Rhyme of the L3 Satellite

Unfortunately I've been writing "poetry" in the AGES observing log again. And that means blog readers will have to suffer my verbal effluence as I ramble incoherently about the problems of satellite-induced RFI and the merits of cats in Coleridge-esque manner.

Pretty pictures will follow shortly to placate those not enamoured of Coleridge spoofs.

The Rhyme of The L3 Satellite

How an Astronomer suffered from interference from a Satellite transmitting in the L3 frequency band, and how the Observatory came to be full of Cats, and the many strange things that befell, and by what means the Astronomer learned to cope with the interference.

Part I

It is an orbiting satellite,
And it transmiteth at L3,
'By thou cursed and wretched RFI,
Wherefore must you lower sensitivity ? 


ALFA's cover is opened wide,
And I am happily observing,
I baked these brownies specially,
A feast of which I am deserving.'

I've developed a tendency to bake things. Amongst other things it makes the observing runs a lot more pleasant.


It holds him with its transmitting strength,
"There was a ship," quoth he,
"Hold off ! Unhand me, satellite, SOON !"
Eftsoons his strength dropped he.


It holds him with its RFI,
The astronomer sat still,
And listens like a three-years' child,
The satellite hath its will.



The Astronomer sat on a chair,
He cannot but choose to fear,
The ruin of his collected data,
From the satellite so near.


'The rocket was cheered, the launch-pad cleared,
Merrily did it aloft,
Above the sky, above the clouds,
Above the control-room top.


(A source rose up upon the left,
O'er the dish came he!
And he shone bright, then on the right
Set below the Observatory.)


Higher and higher every minute,
Toward orbit the rocket went around - "
The Astronomer here had a pang of fear,
For he heard a gong-like sound.

CIMA, the software which controls the telescope, is want to produce many a strange sound when anything happens. A gong indicates something has just finished.


CIMA hath found some errors,
Red on the screen were thee,
Shaking his head with much regret,
The Astronomer preferred to flee.


The Astronomer sat on a chair,
He cannot but choose to fear,
The ruin of his collected data,
From the satellite so near.


But now a new source arose, and it,
Was tyrannous and strong:
It caused unpleasant Gibbs ringing,
But lasted not for long.

Gibbs ringing is caused by very bright sources - basically it just means that the data gets slightly noisier than it should be.


With heavy heart and furrowed brow,
As those struck with RFI must know,
To fear the signal from their foe,
And forward hangs his head,
The Astronomer stuck fast, ignored the blast,
Of the satellite overhead.

[CHRISTMAS INTERMISSION : ROBERT MINCHIN TAKES OVER]

Rhys is away
No poetry today
Problems with the ALFA rotator
Solved before they affected the data


I must turn on the ALFA again
To observe the slowly-drifting sky
And all I ask is a big dish
And a star to steer it by

[...AND WE'RE BACK !]

And in Cardiff it grew wondrous cold,

There came both ice and snow,

The Astronomer sighed, and wondered why,

He was in sunny Puerto Rico.

And through the trees a warming breeze,

Did gift a sweaty sheen,

Nor sign of detection to be ken,

The RFI was all between.

The satellite was still here, up over by there,

Its RFI was all around:

It flushed and caw'd, and gong'd and roared,

In CIMA's many sounds !

There is a running joke about how to navigate in Wales.

At length there sat a kitty-cat,

Down from a hill she came,

As since she was so very thin,

We fed her to make her tame.

She ate the food she ne'er had ate,
And fatter and fatter she grew,
Until one day she stole away,
To produce kittens all anew !

And a good routine was started then,

The kittens they did follow,

And every day, for food and play,

Came to the astronomer's gazebo !

In mist and cloud, when rain allowed,
They for chicken skin did whine;
Whilst all the night, through fog-smoke white,
They slept soundly all the time.

"I despise thee, orbiting satellite,

Your RFI requires I distract,

From this feline-engrossed state ." - "But outside the gate" 

"Someone smote that kitty-cat."

Alas, one of the three kittens had an unfortunate accident with a car - no, NOT my car, actually, I was away at the time. But two remain.

You'll be glad to know that there isn't any more AGES observing scheduled for a while, and in any case the Rime of the Ancient Mariner is quite long, so it will be a long time before part 2 is ready.

Science Made Overly Simple

Science Made Simple is a Cardiff-based science outreach program, for those not aware of the pun. The Up Goer Five text editor isn't, but it could be. Sort of. It's a text editor that only lets you use the 1,000 words most often used. If you're too lazy to click the links, it's called Up Goer Five because the original xkcd comic described the Saturn 5 rocket in such a way.

Anyway. this begs the question : can I explain my job using only the ten hundred most used words ? I don't know, but I'll give it a go. Although the UG5 editor allows you to define words if they're not in its dictionary, I decided to do this in its purest form.

"In space, there are lots of stars in big groups which move around really really fast. Each star goes around and around the middle of all the stars in the group. Some stars are closer to the middle than others. The stars very close to the middle are okay, but the ones far away are going much too fast. In fact, they should all fly off into space without something really heavy to hold them all together.

We can't see what this really heavy thing is but it must be there. Sometimes we also find other stuff (which is a bit like smoke) that is moving even faster than the stars and is even further away from the middle of the stars. This 'smoke' is also moving much too fast so we can be quite sure there must be a really heavy thing we can't see holding the whole lot together. Maybe one day we'll find some fast-moving smoke without any stars inside. That would be really cool, and then we will have a party."

Someone then asked about microlensing :

"Really heavy things can make light turn. We can look at how much the light turns and work out how heavy the thing making it turn is. Sometimes we may not be able to see the things making it turn. These could be very large rocks or other things that are hard to see or maybe because of some interesting dark stuff we don't know anything about."

This is curiously addictive. I guess I got lucky that "stars" are in the dictionary. But what if it wasn't ? How to explain a star ?

"In space there are huge balls of stuff that's a lot like smoke. Sometimes they are so heavy that they start to get smaller, because really heavy things do that. This makes them get hotter. When they get really hot, something amazing happens.

Remember that everything is made of lots of really little things. When things get hot enough, these little things fly around very fast and hit each other. Sometimes they stick together. This sends out even more hot stuff, sort of like fire, only not really but close enough. The hot fire stuff makes everything even hotter, of course, and that makes it even easier for all the little things to hit each other, sending out more fire, and so on.

The big ball of smoke gets hotter and hotter as it gets smaller and all its little things hit each other faster and faster. When it gets really really really hot, there is so much fire stuff that it pushes out very hard. This makes the ball stop getting smaller. Then it just sits there for a very long time, making more of the fire stuff."

One day, someone's going to write an entire textbook like this. But not today.

A Tale of Several Cities (IV) : Everything Else in Long Beach

Since I'd been told that Long Beach was a dump, I booked only one day to look around the place. That turned out to be a mistake, not because there's all that much in Long Beach (there isn't) but because there's a space shuttle lurking somewhere in Los Angeles, which I wasn't aware of so didn't get chance to track down. I didn't even see the eponymous beach. Maybe, like Greenland, it was all a cunning ploy to attract people.

Instead, I nervously began the day with a whale-watching trip - nervous not because of some sudden bout of cetaphobia, but because the last whale-watching trip cost $60 and I saw not the merest hint of any marine life whatsoever. While spending four hours hurtling around the sea in a cold, gale-force wind was rather novel the first time, it's not something I'd rush to do again.

Thankfully, this trip not only cost half of the Boston venture but I saw an infinitely larger number of whales. I'm really not sure how many, because Fin whales (despite being the second largest animal on Earth at 88ft long) can swim at about 25 mph so they're difficult to keep track of. Definitely several. Since they're also only visible for a few seconds, this makes them bloody difficult to photograph too. About 200 photographs and all I got was something that any Nessie hunter would balk at.

Rather more photogenic were the seabirds (by virtue of sheer numbers) and dolphins. The dolphins were particularly memorable, swimming alongside the boat for several minutes, jumping about and generally being very impressive. The trip ended as the boat crossed a school what must have been dozens, or more probably hundreds, of our marine cousins.

After that I continued with the nautical theme for the day with a visit to a Russian submarine. It's docked next to the Queen Mary, a British ocean liner from the 1930's. Rather wonderfully, as you approach a British ocean liner in an American port the first thing you hear is the Russian national anthem blaring out from the submarine's gift shop.

I went to the submarine first because large old boats are fine and all, but in the end are just floating hotels with funnels. There's no explanation (not displayed prominently at any rate) as to how Long Beach came to have a cold-war era Russian sub docked in its harbour, but Wikipedia tells me it was bought off the Australians who bought it from the Russians when it was decommissioned in 1994. So there we are.

Despite the submarine being a Foxtrot-class vessel, the Americans have decided to call it Scorpion. To make things as surreal as possible, the submarine talks to as you in the first person (with a terrible  fake Russian accent), narrating a tour of itself.

"Hello ! I am Scorpion. I can dive over 900ft down. Cannot tell you exactly how far - is secret !"

An audio tour is a great idea because the inside of the sub is tiny - quite plausibly too small to have say, visitors and signs at the same time. Having it speak in the first person is great because it's a little bit mental. I can only imagine what it would be like to do this for other tourist attractions.

"'allo, mate, I'm a bloody great castle...." (for some reason I imagine castles would probably speak with a cockney accent)

Anyway, the inside of the submarine is a fascinating place. How 80 people managed to live and fight in these conditions I'll never know, let alone how they remembered what all the valves did (in places these are wall-to-wall, and unlabelled). It only took about half an hour to see, but it was absolutely worth the minuscule $10 entry free.

The Queen Mary, as I suspected, was absolutely not worth the $25 entry free - it is after all just a hotel, albeit one from the 1930's that floats and has a gun turret on top. But it was something to do for the rest of the day, so I went in anyway.

About the only thing that's interesting about the place - apart from the quite stylish art-deco interior design - was that there happened to be a steampunk convention going on at the time. In my naivety, I wasn't aware such things even existed. But they do. Annoyingly, this meant that many of the rooms were closed off for whatever it is that goes on in steampunk conventions.

More weirdly but far less annoying was the presence of booth babes and other miscellaneous creatures wandering about the boat clad in strange, pseduo-Victorian attire. Fascinating. Though I had to prevent myself from declaring in a loud and obnoxious voice :

"You're all wrong, this ship is from a totally different century, don't you know ANYTHING ??"

Reasoning that steampunk enthusiasts would quite likely have some cleverly-concealed mechanical super-legs, I resisted. I was too tired to run away at this point. So I shall finish with a simple question : what the heck is this ? You can see it from the deck of the Queen Mary. My best guess is it's the lair of some fiendish supervillain hell-bent on secretly breeding an army of genetic supermen to take over the world, but you never know, I might be wrong.

Either that or it's a monument to golf.

A Tale Of Several Cities (III) : AAS in Long Beach

So I've finally recovered enough from a 9,000 mile trip enough to resume writing about it. Humans were never supposed to suddenly flit between 3 completely different time zones in a week, which is yet another reason we should bring back airships without delay. But I digress.

Long Beach was the venue for this year's AAS winter meeting. Two previous attempts for me to attend such a meeting failed spectacularly, but, third time lucky everything went to plan. I wasn't expecting a lot, having repeatedly heard Long Beach (which is basically a glorified suburb of Los Angeles) described as a dump. Which turned out to be very harsh, and having spent my formative years in inner-city Cardiff, I can most definitely tell you what a dump is, and Long Beach is Not It.

It is, however, a somewhat dull and lifeless place, though that might well be the hotel district in the middle of winter. It's also tremendously spread out, with the LA metropolitan area reputedly larger then the whole of Puerto Rico. And that's just silly.

The AAS meeting itself was indeed considerably larger than the summer meetings, almost too large. Going to every potentially-interesting talk and poster was probably impossible, perhaps because there were almost none of either in the summer meeting. On the other hand, there exists an entirely separate spacetime metric in which one can wander to collect freebies from the various booths without infringing on conference time at all. It's magic.

One thing I saw that I'll plug to a wider audience was Microsoft's World Wide Telescope. Yes. I know, it's Microsoft, the George Lucas of the computing world. They make products which everyone relies on and are a heck of a lot better (for many things) than the competition, but everyone hates them.*

* OK, George Lucas probably deserves it these days, because he's gone mad, but not ten years ago.

The fact of the matter, if you want my opinion (yes I'm aware that's an oxymoron) is that the WWT is a lot like Google Sky, except that it's better because it also includes something equivalent to Celestia. WWT has also done a much better job with the digitized sky survey images than Sky, so what you see out of the box (metaphorically - like Sky, it's free) is a lot prettier (though in fairness, Sky has done better processing on the SDSS images). You also don't get any ugly artifacts at the poles with WWT, and as the image tiles are loaded they fade in gradually, which looks much nicer than the instant replacement that happens in Sky.

I don't know if the 3D mode has quite as many features as Celestia, but it seems pretty capable. One thing it can do out of the box that Celestia can't is to zoom out to show the large-scale structure of the Universe (a phrase that never gets old). It shows a few hundred thousands galaxies, which is pretty fun... though I'm going to add the disclaimer that unlike my ALFALFA Sky video, it only uses a few template images - not 11,000 unique images. Cheats.

Another very cool thing I saw was in the booth of the Thirty Metre Telescope. Instead of bringing along a bulky, fragile model, they'd brought a lightweight, easy-to-pack hologram instead. Much like the plastic holograms that used to feature regularly as free toys in cereal boxes, only much bigger and better. The detail was really quite striking, as was the 3D effect but you'll have to take my word for that. I may have to investigate this further.

I also have to mention the freebies that Arecibo was giving away. Pretty conventional, but popular : stickers, magnets, keychains, etc. We also had two extras this year. First were some special CLAWS stickers. The Cat Lovers of Arecibo Welfare Society was formed over the summer to help care for the on-site cats, which it's done very successfully apart from an unfortunate incident involving a car (no, not my car, actually) which I won't go into here.

I made a CLAWS logo more or less as a reflex action, because it's what I do. Can't help myself. It's based on the old Arecibo logo from the Cornell era. It features LIDAR-car (who uses laser beams to study the atmosphere), planetary radar cat (who explores the solar system) and general astronomy cat (who makes cryptic philosophical comments about the Universe). Unfortunately we only printed 60 of these, which was a mistake because they were gone by Monday lunchtime.

My other contribution was a set of bookmarks used for a public outreach activity. The bookmarks illustrate the life cycles of stars of various masses, with ribbons for children (some of whom turned out to be at least 17) to tie different coloured beads on. Unfortunately, we only had a few groups of school-goers allocated to us, so we didn't really make much of a dent in the 900-strong pile of them we had with us. Thankfully, we got rid of almost all of the rest over the remaining two and a half days, which was nice. A few people even took them in bulk to use for teaching classes.

I was able to make the bookmarks in the space of an afternoon, although having made the star model some 9 years back does help, And somewhat gratifying to know that I got a least one useful product out of a hopeless project from such a worryingly long time ago in a city far, far away...

Short of talking about actual science, that about covers it for the AAS. Stay tuned for the final instalment of this thrilling journey, wherein I witness whales, dolphins, a Russian submarine and psuedo-Victorian booth babes wandering around a large old boat.