For episode 8, A*'s comic image size is increasing 33%: from 717x300 to 956x400. At first I thought I'd keep the rest of the site the same width as before, but I'm liking how a site that's been widened to fit the comic looks, so I think I'll just go ahead and make the whole thing fatter. :D

And being the impatient sort, I'm starting on that now, which is why the first episode 1 page--just the title, how exciting! :P--is going up a few days earlier than it usually would.

Okay, I think the site has been thoroughly embiggened in preparation for the big episode 8 comics. Let me know if I missed/broke anything!

By the way, since I won't be animating it myself, is there any interest out there in a good old-fashioned "voiceover contest" for episode 8? :D

(Would probably have way simpler rules this time, too, ie just make a non-obscene movie out of the episode's comics, put it on YouTube, and embed it in the (potential/eventual) contest thread on this forum.)

Some nifty images I came across in doing research for episode 8 today:


image by NASA (source)

That's a polar aurora on Jupiter, as seen in ultraviolet light by Hubble in 2000. The three white dots around the central loop are "footprints" created by electrical arcs between Jupiter and three of its moons: Io, whose volcanic activity adds tons of material to the plasma in Jupiter's magnetosphere every second, creates the brightest dot, on the left; the other two are attributed to Ganymede and Europa.



image by NASA (source)

Cassini mapping of microwave emission from Jupiter's radiation belts, superimposed on a separate photo of the planet. I think this was taken during Cassini's 2001 fly-by, on its way to Saturn. Planetary radiation belts consist of highly charged particles from the Sun, trapped by the planet's magnetic field; Jupiter's magnetic field is 10x stronger than the Earth's and much larger, and as a consequence its radiation belts are thousands of times stronger than the Earth's Van Allen belts. Now, according to Wikipedia,A 5 Sv dose of radiation would lead to death in 50% of human cases within a month, so around Jupiter, even with some shielding, a year's exposure could be equal to something like the equivalent of 5000 fatal doses of radiation. Ouch!



image by NASA (source)

1997 Hubble ultraviolet photo of Saturn, showing the aurorae. From the source caption, it looks like it was believed at the time that Saturn's aurora were only visible in the ultraviolet.



image by NASA (source)

Another view of Saturn's polar aurorae, taken by Hubble in January and March, 2009, and just released a week ago. There's also a neat animated version, where you can see the aurorae moving around the poles, here. This sequence of images was taken by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, which covers the entire visible spectrum, going from near-infrared to ultraviolet, and it isn't clear from the source how much of this was visible light, but from the strong blue coloration I guess it was mostly in the near-ultraviolet, at least.



image by NASA (source)

Visible-light image of Saturn's northern aurora taken by Cassini from October 5th to 8th, 2009; the orange color used to highlight the aurora is artificial (we still don't know what color Saturn's aurora is in visible light!). There's a really lovely animated GIF version of the sequence here.

Other sorta interesting research stuff:

- The interior of the Earth's core is solid, while the outer part is liquid, because the melting point of iron increases significantly with pressure. The core is cooling at about 100 degrees C every billion years; it is currently about 5,400 C, and is thought to have started solidifying 2-4 billion years ago. Because the inner core is now solid while the outer core is liquid, the inner core, floating free from the Earth's mantle, may rotate at a slightly different rate than the crust on which we live.


- Those crazy Soviets decided to make the world's deepest hole; starting in 1970 and active through 1992 (with a year off in '83 to celebrate hitting 12,000m--must have been some party), the Kola Superdeep Borehole ("Superdeep Borehole K*"? :o) reached its deepest depth of 12,262m in '89, which remains the record for the deepest drilled hole.


image by Andre Belozeroff, via Wikipedia

The project had a setback in the year after the party: they were just over 12,000m when 5,000 meters of drill snapped, and they had to start over from 7,000m. Dang. And apparently they didn't get deeper in later years than they'd got in '89, because the stuff they were drilling through was much hotter--180 degrees C--than the 100 degrees C that had been predicted for that depth, and to get to their original target depth of 15,000m would probably have meant getting into 300 degree material, which was hotter than their drill bit could handle.


- COROT (COnvection ROtation and planetary Transits) is a mission by the French Space Agency (CNES) and the European Space Agency (ESA) meant to locate extrasolar planets (planets around stars other than the Sun), mostly by looking for stars that dim regularly as an orbiting planet moves in front of them. To date COROT claims discovery of seven planets. Perhaps the most interesting is COROT-7b, which is unusually near Earth size (1.7x the diameter of Earth) for planets we've found (the easiest ones to find are big ones, around Jupiter size). It's also the fastest-orbiting planet yet found, getting around its star in only 20 hours--it's only 2.5 billion miles from its star (the Earth, for comparison, is about 150 billion km from the Sun), with a surface temperature of something like 2000 degrees C. The planet is about 490 light years away from Earth.


- Osmium, atomic number 76, is the densest natural element. It's used in things like fountain pen tips, where you need a really hard, durable substance. Those would be alloys though I think, as pure osmium forms a toxin when it interacts with oxygen at room temperature. I was surprised that it had a higher density than, say, lead (atomic number 82); osmium's high density is attributed to Lanthanide contraction, which I don't really understand, but has something to do with the inner shells of its particular electron configuration not shielding the outer shells very well from the charged attraction to the atomic nucleus, so the electrons get sucked in closer than usual to the nucleus, making for smaller atoms that can be packed densely together.

I can't comment on v.o. just yet, but I could probably make a music / sfx version of the images.

Whatever you wanna do would be rad. I'll try to make the episode sufficiently interesting. :D

I got most of episode 8's script written today, so tomorrow will be polishing it up and then starting in on storyboards. This episode will take place around nifty stuff like planetary magnetospheres and radiation belts, and hey I put together bunch of nifty magnetosphere reference images for us on the forum, like with aurorae and stuff. (Although the planet in the episode will be too weird to have an aurora, actually. :o) And do you know what the densest natural element is, or the deepest hole ever drilled by humans? Those and other interesting and possibly relevant trivia are to be found behind that link as well!

And I don't have reference photos handy for these, but the episode will also include heaping helpings of deception, double-cross, death, and despair, a sizable smidgen of spite, and at least one space battle. Ooh and we just may find out some actual info behind that deadly encounter at Tempus 477! Oooh (2) and here's a possibly too revealing/obvious hint: how do you hide a star?

If I can draw all this stuff right, episode 8 could turn out pretty good!

Lovely picture of Saturn there.

Yeah! Saturn seems to be pretty photogenic, once you have a telescope powerful enough to zoom in on that lovely ring system. :D