Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
After Bhopal, the Stars
In 1985, I was working as a producer at Activision. Some very unique people brought me a
very unique proposal for a product.
They were three middle-aged men who had worked for a long time at Union Carbide
as engineers. The Bhopal Disaster and Union Carbide's role had sickened them, and they
had begun to develop software instead. They had developed an astronomy program that
would run on most of the contemporary platforms. You could scroll around a view of the
sky from your own location. If you were looking at the sky at the same time, you could get
the view to match up, then identify stars. The program contained data from an astronomical
catalog. You could change your viewing position or the date of the view. It blew my mind.
This proposal came in before laptops were in common use. Management dismissed
the proposal. “Nobody would take their computer outside to look at the sky.”
It was hard to tell those fellows that the answer was “no.” They were excellent engi-
neers and had done an amazing thing. It was just too far ahead of its time.
A few years ago I fell in love with an iPhone
app called
Starwalk
produced by Vito Technolo-
gies. The phone acts as a sort of magic lens on
the stars. As you move your phone (and body)
around, you see constellations fade in and out.
You can identify stars and get high-resolution pic-
tures of many of them. You can even see stars on
the other side of the earth from where you are
standing. And you can change the year/epoch of
your view.
Those fellas who left Union Carbide would
be happy that somebody has done this. It's a gift
to all of us.
and provide access to active data sources that are currently unavailable to
the public in digital form (or at all).
Computer scientist Sean White is one of the heroes of distributed sens-
ing. During his PhD studies at Columbia, he worked on a system called
the
Electronic Field Guide,
a large-scale collaboration between Columbia,
