The holidays are over and it’s time for an Exoplanet Explorer update. The HD version gets 22 new planets that were announced in the past month or so. Both versions get some minor improvements and bug fixes. Amongst the new planets are two terran worlds in the habitable zone of their stars! Kepler-438 b At 1.27 times the Earth’s mass, this rock
In the early 1840’s, our Solar System had seven known planets. At this time, a French mathematician named Urbain Le Verrier, discovered that Uranus’ orbit may have been disturbed by a large unknown planet. Some years later, in 1846, Heinrich d’Arrest announced the discovery of Neptune. This new planet didn’t fully account for Le Verrier’s calculations, so the hunt for
China and Russia have both recently been discussing plans for mining a valuable element on the Moon. They are interested in Helium-3, an isotope that is rare on Earth, but “relatively” abundant on the Moon where it is deposited by the Solar winds. Helium-3 is desirable for use as fuel in fusion reactors. It can release a great deal of energy
In January 2006, the New Horizon spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral on a decade long journey to visit Pluto. In late August of the same year, about mid-way between Mars and Jupiter, the little probe would have received word that Pluto had been re-classified a “dwarf planet”. Approximately eight years have passed since then. In
This has to be one of the most impressive astronomy photos I’ve seen in a while. It’s an image of a disc of material orbiting the star HL Tau, 450 light years away. You can clearly see gaps in the disc where planets are forming as they sweep up all the material while orbiting the
With the new Exoplanet Explorer apps out for nearly a week now, I’ve had some feedback and time to fix some minor issues and make improvements. What’s new The ghostly labels that looked like a fog appearing near the center of the screen are now gone. A side effect of the Tegra fix. They didn’t
It took me two days to figure out why the newly released Exoplanet Explorer would occasionally start without showing a user interface. What made it really difficult was that the app worked perfectly on my collection of Android devices. I couldn’t reproduce the issue. Thanks to everyone who contacted me by email. Because of your help I eventually
I’ve finally finished the new version of Exoplanet Explorer! This is a complete rewrite of the original Shiva code, for Unity. Though it’s taken some time, now that it’s done it should be a lot easier to maintain. The old Shiva code was very awkward to work with, mainly because Shiva wasn’t really flexible enough
Don’t let lazy script writers get away with playing the water card! Demand a better class of alien invasion! Despite Hollywood’s fascination with aliens trying to steal our oceans, space is far from a parched desert. The heavier an element is, the the less common it is. H2O is composed of the first and eighth most
Shortly after the last update of Solar Explorer HD, I began seriously working on re-writing my last Shiva app, Exoplanet Explorer. Things have been going smoothly and it’s now starting to look great. At this stage, most of the screens from the old version have been recreated and improved. The main things left to finish are