When the Deep Impact probe finishes taking images of comet Hartley 2 in a few weeks, it will have made some 120,000 images of the comet. Yet from just the first five images released of the close-up flyby, Daniel Macháček created a very nice animation of the flyby. Animation is almost the wrong word here, because it conjures up the idea of something being drawn, instead, Macháček used the actual images and software to put the flyby into action.
From the youtube page, "Daniel Macháček created this smooth animation from the five images of Hartley 2 released by the Deep Impact team immediately following its flyby on November 4, 2010. He used Squirlz Morph. Time in the animation is five times faster than the actual speed of the flyby."
The part that fascinates me about this animation is the timespan involved. This animation is only accelerated five times. In other words, this video in real time would run just over three minutes, which isn't that long.
Because of the scales involved in space exploration, I imagine events like this taking hours or days. That this glimpse of the flyby involves only a few minutes shows just how close we came to Hartley 2.
This is another one of those moments when it strikes me just how tangible space exploration can be. We're a strange species, humans. We took little bits of rock, broke them down and refined them into their elemental parts; aluminum, titanium, magnesium, carbon, silicon; assembled these bits of rock into a brilliant design, placed on top of a semi-controlled bomb of liquid oxygen and lamp fuel (kerosene, more or less), and blasted it into the depths of space on a trajectory calculated with the equations of an alchemist and occultist who lived 250 years ago, to visit another bit of rock floating in space, trying to learn how those elemental pieces came to form our own floating speck and the solar system as a whole.
And I wouldn't have it any other way.
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