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A Snapshot of the Plot of the Inner Solar System

Posted by michael on from the got-rocks? dept.

BawbBitchen writes "The BBC is running an interesting story about a bunch of Astronomers who have produced a snapshot of the Solar System as of 26 July 2002. Here is the full image and here is a 5.1MB animated GIF (each frame is 961 x 961 pixels) of the map. The credits say it was generated on an OpenVMS system using the PGPLOT graphics library and the animation was done on a RISC OS 4.03 system."

2 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. misleading by capt.Hij · · Score: 4, Informative
    The project is really cool, and the plots are fascinating. However, the plots that are produced are misleading. The role of science and the media is a growing concern, and it was on slashdot earlier today.

    When you look at the plots it looks like the whole space is filled. This is not even close to representing the true picture since the spacial scales are so large, the actual masses are really smaller than pinpoints. The media is putting out misleading pictures without giving any explanation about the scale, and it looks like we are sitting inside a virtual fog bank of asteroids.

  2. Here's another version by portwojc · · Score: 3, Informative

    APOD July 24th

    Gives the usual detailed information.