Thursday, September 24, 2009
Australian dust storm caught on fantastic amateur video, simulating Mars
Look at Phil Sandberg’s film "Sydney Harbour Covered by Dust Storm" during the dust storm in eastern Australia a couple days ago.
The film shows how dust changes the tint in actual digital video processing.
This is what Mars might look like if it were terraformed, water was reintroduced, and cities could be built on it – in the summer only.
JonesUK has a video actually called “The Day I Woke Up on Mars”
Note the experimentation with colors and the Club Bondi, apparently a bar.
According to Kate Schneider of News AU, a second dust storm is on the way, story here.
The winds blow from the SW, from South Australia. In the US this would be a dry “cold front” (not very cold) in the spring (as N and S are reversed). Doug Hill of Washington Station WJLA would have fun explaining this to high school students on that station’s field trips to schools.
Hill has said that a dust storm from Africa (the Sahara -- more like a sandstorm) is blowing into the Atlantic and breaking up potential hurricanes this season.
Try looking up Sydney, Australia on weather.com.
Sorry, this event won’t bring on the “Waltzing Matilda” of the Nevil Shute novel and film “On the Beach”.
If you want to look at a video purporting to prove that Rover Spirit actually found buildings from a previous civilization on Mars, check this video ("Mars: NASA Found Buildings") link (no embed offered). To me, it looks like a History Channel movie about Area 51 (or an exhibit in Las Vegas). The best representation of Mars in Hollywood may be John Carpenter's "Ghost of Mars" with the train and central city. But Scientific American, in some drawings of hypothesized alien plant life on smaller planets around M stars, actually depicted an earth concrete building in one still (April 2008). Out there, other places may be more like home than expect.