Friday, November 04, 2005
I just saw the missing data (the rectangles in this image) and thought of 2001 (not just the movie... but what actually happened in the real year 2001). . And also thought: Isn't the sun beautiful? Isn't it amazing how we can heliograph so many different ways now? Later on, while catching a bit of that sun, I had a nagging suspicion that I'd mis-used the word heliography, thinking: "Helio" (meaning sun) and "graphy" (as in geography). Sure enough, I had. I'd meant to express "the study of the Sun")... but the word meant: photography!
And I wondered: Did Sol have to wait until 1826 for someone to take a picture of it?
I found another site preserving heliography as "the art of using mirrors for communications".
Heliography is alive and well - and means all these things at the same time!
Just look at how we can capture the sun today.- "The killer app is solar thermal water propulsion. That means taking something as simple as mirrors in space — where the solar energy is intense — simply reflecting that intense sunlight onto a little heat exchanger, squirting water from a big bag through the heat exchanger, flashing it to superheated steam out the nozzle in the back, and off you go." - J. Dixon
