A Little Gosh Wow

I've been out and about this week, first to a Physics For Fiction meeting at Imperial College, organised by Dave Clements, in which scientists met and mingled with science-fiction writers, and gave a variety of excellent talks about their work. Great fun, especially when I got to talking with Subu Mohanty about his work on brown dwarfs. Today, I was at the World Conference of Science Journalists to take part in a panel organised by Oliver Morton. The centre of London drenched in sunlight under a hot blue sky and Westminster Abbey looked like bleached coral by Max Ernst: a cover for J.G. Ballard's Drought.

Seen at the Physics For Fiction meeting:

An HD movie of the (deliberate) crash of the Japanese probe Kaguya (Selene) on the surface of the Moon.

An animation of the orbits of stars around the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* at the centre of the Galaxy. Watch SO-2 and SO-16. When these two stars swing in close around Sag A* they're moving fast.