Sagan Planetarium

People have always been interested in space and learning about it. One way of educating, as well as entertaining, the masses about the planets and stars for many decades has been planetariums. Second Life has it's own: the Sagan Planetarium. So what is the place like?

Read more in Places.

This Week At The Science Circle: "Prospero’s Planetarium"

“Prospero’s Planetarium“, by Rob Knop

 

Saturday, December 23th at 10 AM PST

A functional planetarium is something I wanted to create when I first started with Second Life and saw its building and scripting capabilities. I quickly saw the limits, however. At the time, prims couldn’t be any bigger than 10m, and texture mapping on a sphere broke down at the poles.
After a couple of years, I built the 80-prim monstrosity that I have today — and I still think it probably ought to be bigger. The planetarium shows the bright stars in the sky and all eight planets (with Earth not actually being in the sky).

I will be showing the sorts of things you can do with it, as well as how to use the control panels to set various things about the planetarium. I will also discuss its limits– one of which may be the textures don’t all rez, and lag kills us, with a bunch of avatars in there at once!– and experiments I hope to do in improving it.

More information at https://sciencecircle.org/nextpresentation/

The Science Circle (61/126/32) 

World Space Week in Second Life

It's World Space Week this week. It was 61 years ago today in which the Russians (then the USSR) launched Sputnik, the first satellite into space. Second Life has numerous space-themed locations, the best known being the International Space Museum at Spaceport Alpha (114,142,23).

Another place is the Sagan Planetarium at Aspen (199, 119, 3729). which has a small museum and a Planetarium. One can also find a laser tag maze on the sky platform at (133,168,3720).

The National Space Society is having an activity of their own. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, they're doing a kind of poll in which residents are asked to rank the probability of certain kinds of Trek technology from warp drive, to transporters, to replicators. You can head there to take part, or just look around, at National Space Society (128,152,1261)

There's a lot more to see space-wise, but part of the fun of space exploration is, well, exploring.

"See you later, space cowboy."

Bixyl Shuftan

Yuri's Night 2015

Last weekend was the anniversary of the first manned mission to space by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Although the event at the time was seen as a propaganda victory for Communism, with the thaw of the Cold War, it's been seen more as a triumph for Mankind in general, and is celebrated by space fans every year. This includes those in Second Life, who got together for a couple parties and a contest with a prize worthy of an aspiring astronaut.

Read more in Events.