Friday, October 21, 2011

WEEK 9: Black Holes as told by Andrew Hamilton

This week we had a very distinguished visitor to our class, CU Professor in the Dept of Astrophysics and developer of the Black Hole Flight Simulator, the inimitable and exciting Andrew Hamilton. His website is full of research and examples of his particular type of science visualizations, or SCI VIS, made to think about black holes in space.  He has contributed science visualizations to NOVA programs, to travelling Planetarium shows originally developed at the Denver Science Museum, and in fact it's hard to  do any research on black hole visuals without bumping into him--he is surely the dark star of our Astrophysics dept! Check out this article on him "Strange Physics" at DISCOVER magazine.

3 comments:

  1. NASA has some incredible photos of black holes with Chandra.....http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/category/blackholes.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. New info on black holes, trending on Yahoo today...
    http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27307/?ref=rss

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ashley -- it's really awesome how you can look at the Xray version, optical version, and then composite version. Makes it feel like you are really looking at something real! Sometimes I get a little disenchanted with space images because they are always "visualizations", which is obviously really awesome still, but sometimes really understanding the wavelengths of light that you are looking at makes it that much better.

    Some really cool images on this site.

    ReplyDelete