For the tenth anniversary of the orbiting X-ray observatory the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, I made a new version of the All-Sky Monitor Movie an animation showing how the X-ray sky looked every 12 hours over the last decade. The original version was made by Don Smith (now at Guilford colloge) and I, under the supervision of Ed Morgan, Al Levine, and Hale Bradt at MIT. A description of the movie, along with the movie itself (which is 41 MB large) is on my (slightly more) professional site.
This being a weblog, it is my opportunity to gripe a bit. I spent several days on the new movie, which is not much time compared to the months it takes me to complete my usual research projects, but it was my vacation time. I had to get Ed Morgan to recover the original routines to make the individual frames off of a back-up, because the disk they were on recently died, and then modify the routine so that the images looked less "Dr. Who-ey" as someone put it. Then I needed to track down a program to compile them as an mpeg (the MJPEG tools worked well). I was happy with how it turned out.
I then turned it over to NASA, so they could put out a press release. It was in the "top 10 most e-mailed news articles" on Yahoo for like 20 minutes early on a Saturday morning! However, if you have the badwidth to spare, you'll see that when they converted it to MOV and SWF formats (what's SWF? is it for a personal ad?), it looks like crap.
Oh, well. I didn't expect to be up for "best animated short" later this month, anyway. . .
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Posted by: contaminated soil | December 31, 2008 at 02:01 AM