Wednesday, July 9, 2014

More Asteroids

My favourite non-Boosh Zooniverse has relaunched: Asteroid Zoo - helping astronomers spot and catalogue new orbiting rocks.  The pics are bigger, the interface is slicker, but the best thing is the new colour-rotation mode; it highlights differences in the four image sequence, so a moving object shows as a line of flashing dots against the solid white star field.  It also coincidentally creates the effect of watching a short silent movie of the sky, complete with occasional blips, scratches and frame wandering. Another side-effect shows when a bright star causes a kind of lens-flare - the overloaded pixels around the edge gain a pleasing early-arcade-game rainbow colour cycle.