The James Webb Space Telescope hangs like a Christmas tree ornament over Africa as it prepares to deploy its mirror and travel to its distant orbit. Image credit: NASA/ESA 25/Dec/2021.
PDL and the James Webb Space Telescope (broadcasting and dimension tricks)
I am an astronomer who has for 30 years used PDL for processing of astronomical data. (In fact this is one of the reasons I created it :-) see 'The Beginnings of PDL').
The North Pole Workshop’s logistics department has been busy this year
with upgrading the sleigh’s dash-cam with a new more powerful computer.
They’ve asked the research and development department if there is
anything that can be done with the extra cycles to make the journey
safer. After bouncing around a couple ideas, they came up with a plan
for an autoland system…but since Santa and the reindeer do not operate
in typical environments (such as roofs), this would not be a typical
autoland system (which use microwave/radio guidance) so they couldn’t
select anything off-the-shelf (and they do know their shelves).
For years, I've had this urge to use PDL to take a bitmap image and trace the outlines to make an SVG file that I could scale up to A0 poster size without the resulting pixelation. Yes, there are already tools that do that, but where's the fun in that? It's Christmas, the time for Fun and Games!