Neave Planetarium, Black holes, Spacewar! computer game

[Nostromics Newsletter]

Nostromics Newsletter

Nostromics science gifts product news, educational resources & science tidbits

Nostromics Newsletter, 23 February 2011 - You are welcome to share this mail

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Neave Planetarium

Neave Planetarium is an online planetarium application accessible with a web browser. It displays the sky as can be seen at any time and from any location on Earth.

Visit the Neave Planetarium site and click everywhere to start. The application displays a map of the sky at the current time and default location, which you can change by clicking the Earth map at the top right to reflect your own observing site. The horizon is the line with tick marks for compass points.

To view the sky in the past or future, set a new date and time with the "Date & Time" panel at the top left. Click the sky map to look around, click again to stop. Move the pointer on a star or object to get some basic information and data.

Black holes

Black holes need no introduction in pop astronomy. They are among the best known and most fascinating objects in the universe. A black hole is a region of space in which there is such a concentrated mass, that not even light can escape, and space and time are deformed.

Our original Black Hole Women's T-Shirt is inspired by the intense gravity of these objects. The design shows blue Black Hole text bent along an arc by the gravity of a hole-like circle below, with some of the letters pulled toward it. But unusual gravitational effects occur only near black holes, which do not "suck" far away like vacuum cleaners. If the Sun instantly turned into a black hole, the Earth would continue orbiting it as usual without falling toward it.

See the Black Hole Hooded Sweatshirt, tote bag and other gifts with the same design in the Astronomy section of Nostromics Store. More science gifts and products at Nostromics Store.

The Spacewar! computer game

Spacewar! was an influential early computer game developed in 1962 by Steve "Slug" Russel while a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The game was about two spaceships moving and shooting one another in the gravity field of a star. The software run on a PDP-1 minicomputer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation.

Although the PDP-1 had limited computational resources, Spacewar! was innovative for both its pioneering new programming techniques and for inventing a videogame genre. For example, it used crude but impressive realtime graphics displayed on a circular, radar-like screen similar to an oscilloscope. The first computer joystick was invented for Spacewar! to make more comfortable operating the game controls, which originally required flipping switches on the computer control panel.

-- Paolo Amoroso & Mauro Arpino (Nostromics), science educators - Milan, Italy

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Copyright (C) 2011 by Paolo Amoroso and Mauro Arpino