Go into the light!
Jul. 5th, 2005 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinI heard on the Bad Astronomy forums that some Fox (Fox News Channel?) TV reporter was talking with a JPL scientist about this picture of Comet Tempel 1 post-impact and kept asking him to explain "the tunnel". That was as baffling to me as it must have been to the scientist, but then I stared at the picture until the backlit gusher of ejected gas and dust seemed to turn inside out, and, hey, it does look like the comet is flying into a brilliantly lit tunnel! Sometimes it's hard to guess what something like this will look like to fresh eyes.
Also: The Planetary Society put together a nice image sequence taken over two fifths of a second around impact (each frame is 1/20 second apart). According to the news article, the cross-shaped flash is the (overexposed) incandescent flare from the actual impact; the rest is sunlit ejecta. In the third frame, you can see from the shadow it casts that the thickest part of the plume is actually tall and narrow, though it's lost to direct view in the general glare.
Also: The Planetary Society put together a nice image sequence taken over two fifths of a second around impact (each frame is 1/20 second apart). According to the news article, the cross-shaped flash is the (overexposed) incandescent flare from the actual impact; the rest is sunlit ejecta. In the third frame, you can see from the shadow it casts that the thickest part of the plume is actually tall and narrow, though it's lost to direct view in the general glare.
