Wanna know the radius of the observable universe in Planck lengths?
Wanna see a map of the Virgo supercluster? Check out my updated
web page on "distances":
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/distances.html
It still needs lots of work, but I just improved it a bunch,
thanks especially to this website showing nested 3d maps of the
cosmos:
http://www.anzwers.org/free/universe/index.html
On a vaguely related note, here are some last-minute shopping
suggestions. I want to put these in a This Week's Finds, but
I might not have time before Christmas....
I just saw this book in a local store, and it's GREAT:
1) Robert Dinwiddie, Philip Eales, David Hughes, Ian Nicholson, Ian Ridpath,
Giles Sparrow, Pam Spence, Carole Stott, Kevin Tildsley, and Martin Rees,
Universe, DK PUblishing, New York, 2005.
If you like the astronomy pictures you've seen here lately, you'll love
this book, because it's *full* of them - all as part of a well-organized,
clearly written, information-packed but nontechnical introduction to
astronomy - from the Solar System to the Oort Cloud to the Milky Way to
the Local Group to the Virgo Supercluster, sailing right out to the
Universe at large... all the way back to the Big Bang!
What's good about this book is that it takes you on a visual tour of the
biggest, best place we know. The only thing it seems to lack - I may
have missed it - is a nice 3d map showing the relative scales of our
Solar System, Galaxy, and so on. Luckily there's a nice wall chart that
has just that:
2) Art.com, Universe Chart, wall poster, 31 x 20 inches, available at
http://www.art.com/asp/sp-asp/_/PD--10091966/SP--A/IGID--860961/Universe_Chart.htm
I'm getting this to put on the wall of the math department near my office...
gotta keep the kids thinking big!
3) Bathsheba Grossman, Large scale model of a typical
100-megaparsec cube of the universe,
http://www.bathsheba.com/crystalsci/largescale/
My friend David Schaffenberg just gave me one of these. It's great!
Look at those superclusters...
.
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