mailMe

Why Arcsecond?

I get asked that question an awful lot. Well, you know how a full circle is divided up into 360 degrees? Well, each degree is divided up into 60 minutes or arc and each minute is divided up into 60 seconds of arc. So, one arcsecond is equal to 1/60th of 1/60th of 1/360th of the entire circumference of any circle.

When I was in college I spent an entire Saturday afternoon doing the math long hand to figure out why a parsec is a parsec. And the unit of measurement of one arcsecond comes into play there. The process went a little like this:

  1. You know how sci-fi shows always use the parsec to tell distance in space, but when I looked it up a parsec was listed as 3.258 light-years with out any explanation as to why that number was chosen.
  2. I found an obscure reference that went something like "a parsec is the distance that subtends an AU at one second". Alas, I could find no definition of the word subtend anywhere. But it gave me a clue.
  3. I knew that a light year is the distance that light travels in one year. I knew that the speed of light was about 186'000 miles per second. I knew that one AU (astronomical unit) is the distance from Earth to the Sun, about 93 million miles.
  4. After making sure of the math that Saturday afternoon it turns out that one parsec (parallax second) is the radius of a circle such that the linear distance traveled on the circumference of the circle by the radial distance of one arcsecond is equal to one AU.
  5. So 1/60th of 1/60th of 1/360th of the circumference of this giant circle is one AU. Whatever the radius of that circle is becomes one parsec.
Whew!! make sense? The fact that I'll spend a Saturday afternoon doing something like that says a lot about me. I liked the sound of the word arcsecond and I felt it was appropriate for an animator (because computer animaton involves a lot of rotations) so I've adopted it as my Nom de Plume on the internet.

Rotations and arcseconds also come into play in one of my other hobbies Celestial Navigation. That's navigation by the stars. So I felt using a sextant as a logo was also quite fitting.

About Me

I'm an animator. I grew up watching cartoons and Sci-fi shows and never quite grew out of it. So I decided to make it a career. And I'm glad I did. It's one of those jobs that you don't do unless you love it.

As an animator I have a background in Traditional animation (that's done by drawing each frame out by hand on a sheet of paper) but found out that I like animating much better than I like drawing (does that make sense?) So I switched over to 3d animation. In 3d animation I discovered that I have a knack for programming so now I try and combine the two.
Animation-wise I'm very interested in communication by body language or facial expressions devoid of any dialogue.
Artistically I've recently been exploring the look of Non-Photorealistic Rendering techniques (including charcoal drawing and 'toon shaded looks) as I've never been happy with the trend towards Realism in CG. Why bother recreating something in CG that would be easier to just film in live-action? To me that's not what animation is for.

Is there anything in particular you'd like to know about me? Go ahead and eMail me and, if it's not too personal, I'll do my best to answer you.

Design Philosophy: I've tried to keep this page accessible from a variety of systems, installations, and browsers. Unfortunately this goal is not always compatible with the features I want. I've kept my JavaScript and CSS code inline rather than "src="ing it from separate files. This increases file size (and consequently download times) and makes upkeep and synchronization much more difficult but pretty much insures that even those with older browsers will be able to view the basics.

I've tried to give you every option in how you choose to view my page. If there are choices to be made in navigation direction I've let you make them rather than doing any sort of automatic re-direction. All windows that are generated by this page are fully resizable and re-positionable. Admittedly some windows won't have scrollbars, but that's because nothing too large should ever be put into them.

I've also done my best to make sure that my JavaScript is cross-browser compatible.

Webcam

WooHoo! Watch me animate. If you're really amazingly interested I occasionally load up the webcam and am viewable here.
Resume | Gallery | Tools