Deep space exploration on your home computer

With the successful (and not really that successful) landing of the mars explorers launched by NASA (and ESA), there also is a big interest in findings. Pictures taken by the mars rover “Spirit” made it through the news, and it definitely is a huge success to be able to view the surface of the red planet in such detail. Pictures from earlier missions that just passed by the planet could only give an idea of how the surface really looks like. Now we will have to see what results the close-up examination of those rocks will reveal.
But not only can you look at some of the pictures taken, no, the scientists let us experience the real feeling of this mission. The software used to control the mars rover is available for download for all major platforms. You can also download the first data-package that contains images and data gathered from Spirit after its landing. You have several different views taken with the various onboard cameras. There even is a basic three-d rendering of the ground around the landing site that you can rotate and zoom. The high resolution images are definitely the most impressive ones though. Updates of new data are supposed to be released regularly.
Now if you need some help finding Mars on your stellar roadmap, then there is another really impressive (and free!) program that gives you a live rendered 3d universum you can freely move through and explore. It is called Calestia and has a real impressive list of features. Not only is it very comprehensive (at least it seems so to me :), but it uses some really neat visualisation that makes your space travel feel very real actually.
If you are at least vaguely interested in astronomy these programs should make for a few hours of excitement.

Computer Nostalgia

In the world of computers everything is moving fast. Especially the pace of hardware development is often astounding.
Just these days i had this “Wow” experience and flash of nostalgia when i got an old computer mag from the year 1995 in my fingers. Top of the line computers were running Intel Pentiums with 100MHz. Wasn’t that longer ago than 8 years? No, it wasn’t obviously.
A few interesting and long forgotten facts about hardware in these days:

• CD-ROM’s available were running at a maximum of 4x speed
• HD’s commonly available had around one gigabyte of capacity. Only some SCSI drives with up to 4 gigabytes storage space, but hardly affordable.
• RAM in a machine off the shelves was 8 megabytes in size, and for what we pay for 512 MB today, you did not even get 4 MB back then.
• Not to forget, the graphics cards in consumer machines gave you a resolution of 800×600 pixels if you were up to date.

Thinking about what hardware we are running today, this has been painful back then. Possibilities in computer use had been severely limited just by the lacking capabilities of hardware and available processing power. These were the days when you did not find a computer in nearly every home, just because it still was too expensive.
The race for faster machines did not stop since then, if anything the speed picked up. New generations of CPU’s to be seen every second year at least. But compared to the mentioned 8 years ago, today must be like heaven for every computer geek. Hardware is nearly dirt-cheap today and is at the same time capable of running any kind of software fast enough.
I think a while ago we have reached the point where we are not waiting for our computer anymore when we work, but the other way around. Of course if you are working with huge images or render things with your 3D software, calculations still take some time. But not in a way that it would be inconvenient.
So realizing this, i am quite happy with how computer technology has come along and where we are now. Brave new world? No, just right the way it is.