You can think of flying to Mars like one of those art films where the director has to shoot the movie in a single take. Even if no scene is especially challenging, the requirement that everything go right sequentially, with no way to pause or reshoot, means that even small risks become unacceptable in the aggregate.
Suppose you had a luxury spacecraft spinning at 1RPM to create 0.5g using centripetal force, as is often depicted in science fiction:
I believe that the perpetually spinning views would be extremely nauseating for most humans, even for short visits. Even worse, I suspect - when it comes to the comfort of the experience - would be the constantly moving light and shadows from the sun.
A lovely visualisation of asteroids in our solar system.
Beautiful high resolution posters of our planetary neighbourhood.
Take an interactive tour of our solar system’s many moons.
This orrery is really quite wonderful! Not only is it a great demonstration of what CSS can do, it’s a really accurate visualisation of the solar system.
A collection of short stories and essays speculating on humanity’s future in the solar system. The digital versions are free to download.
Luke just demoed this at Codebar. It’s a lovely audio/visualisation of the solar system—a sonic orrery that you can tweak and adjust.
Hypnotic.
The Long Now Foundation has been posting some great stuff on their blog lately. The latest is a look at orreries, clocks, and computers throughout history …and into the future.
This is a rather lovely idea—a disc with eight rings, each marked with the position of a planet, the arrangement of which corresponds to a specific date.
This web page is half a mile wide.