The latest Carnival of Space is the "Tunguska Edition," marking the hundredth anniversary of the Tunguska Event on June 30, 1908 (which I wrote about on my birthday, which was not a hundredth anniversary). This week's host is Mang's Bat Page. There are a few posts on Tunguska (Astroprof provides an excellent overview) but a lot more on other spacey subjects. Check it out.The screen capture here is from Orbiter, with only "impact event" surface features selected. Tunguska is near the center of the view, and you can see there are quite a few others.
4 comments:
Very cool image.
How'd you do that BTW?
It's a screen shot from Orbiter, a free space flight simulator that I often use for educational outreach presentations (for schools, scouts, libraries, etc.). I also write about Orbiter a lot on this blog. See www.orbitersim.com and also the links on my side bar including my (free) ebook for Orbiter, "Go Play In Space." Orbiter is developed by Dr. Martin Schweiger of University College London with support of many free add-on developers.
Thanks.
BTW is it just me or does the distribution of impacts on this look non-random? Perhaps it's perspective causing things to look bunched.
Good question, and I'm not really sure. It's partly perspective (a lot of distant points appear bunched together), and I think it's also related to looking at the north polar region where craters may not be quite as obscured by plate tectonics, vegetation, etc.
Note also that the "marker" files in Orbiter are made by users, so it also depends on what source(s) they used and how completely the data was entered.
There is an old Google Earth overlay for impact events linked below - I suppose there may be something more comprehensive now.
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/71111/page/0
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