The Vela Pulsar as a Spirograph

(Before It's News)

This image compresses the Vela movie sequence into a single snapshot by merging pie-slice sections from eight individual frames.
Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration

I loved my Spirograph when I was young, and obviously Eric Charles, a physicist with the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope team did too. Charles has taken data from Fermi’s Large Area Telescope and turned it into a mesmerizing movie of the Vela Pulsar. It actually is a reflection of the complex motion of the spacecraft as it stared at the pulsar.

The video shows the intricate pattern traced by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope’s view of the Vela Pulsar over the spacecraft’s 51 months in orbit.
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© nancy for Universe Today, 2013. |
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Post tags: Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, Pulsars, Spirograph, Vela Pulsar

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