Author notes

132 - Soul of a Poet (Cutting Room)

El Cid

on Dec. 14, 2016

This page was a borderline cutting room casualty, and maybe it really should have just been cut. There's some not-so-great art on this page, and I wasn't exactly crazy about how the recycled triple panel gag at the end came out. But oh well. It's free. Might as well share it!

Better pages on the way. I should be getting the next one up by Friday.




Here's something random but neat. It's an animation by Czech astronomer Peter Scheirich illustrating the graceful orbital dance of the Hilda asteroid family.

The Hildas are a dynamical group of asteroids that skirt the outer edge of the Main Belt in a 3:2 orbital resonance with Jupiter. Each individual asteroid has an elliptical orbit, but the overall combination of their orbits produces a really cool triangle pattern.



Oh, and those green dots that follow Jupiter around? Those are the Jupiter trojans, two giant piles of asteroids that have collected in Jupiter's Lagrangian points, which are sort of gravitational dead zones where the sun and Jupiter's gravity cancel each other out. Saturn and Uranus don't have stable trojan groups, but Neptune may have as many or more trojans than Jupiter has.

Hasta la pasta! See you Friday. Or Saturday. Or whenever.