Venus and more

[steuard]

When our college president sent out his monthly campus update, I was pleasantly surprised to see my picture: he was happy about the very successful public viewing event that another professor and I arranged for the transit of Venus on June 5. (I'm up for tenure this fall, so the recognition is good!) We got an article on the front page of the

Comments

[beth_leonard]

Awesome!! I loved the talk so much I shared it on my G+ page. (I'm assuming you don't mind.) Clearly a great event for your college. When will the full resolution .pdf poster be ready?
--Beth

[steuard]

I'm glad you enjoyed the talk (and yes, I'm happy to see it shared)! The poster is pretty much done: there's a bit more fine tuning I'd like to do (before soliciting friends' feedback and probably doing more), but the one external thing I'm waiting for is official word from the college whether including their logo is appropriate in this case.

[kirinn]

Sweet poster! I'm surprised there aren't more like it already, but it looks good, and I look forward to reading the full version. Reminds me of my youth in the local space academy summer camp, as does the football field demo you set up. I think we once tried to do a scale model with various craft foam spheres for the planets, which of course resulted in a humongous circle of paper for the sun, and much longer distances than we could manage.

[steuard]

It's possible that there are similar posters out there that just don't show up well in Google search results; I haven't looked that carefully. (I know of a somewhat similar poster by the Planetary Society that doesn't turn up there.) But I can only speculate as to the reasons why things like this aren't more commonly available.

Lots of existing posters focus on nice big images of each planet rather than on accurate relative sizes. And (as I mentioned earlier) almost every attempt to present facts about the planets winds up giving boring facts. And as for image selection, for a long time we just didn't have real pictures of Jupiter and Saturn in high enough resolution to work on a big poster, so artists' impressions became pretty standard. (It's still a bit dicey: this is the second-highest resolution true-color Saturn image released by NASA that I know of, and the resolution is borderline for a big poster. The highest resolution one isn't quite as good an angle for my purposes here. And I've gone with this partial (gibbous) Jupiter