Category Archives: 3D

Project Fish: Clachtoll Jellyfish Bloom

We took The Fish (need to find a better name?) over to Clachtoll on the west coast of the northern Highlands of Scotland to see what was under the surface. Good timing, it turns out, as a jellyfish bloom was going on. When conditions are right jellyfish reproduce in huge numbers all over Scotland, sometimes even resulting in issues for nuclear power stations!

Project Fish is the “engineering arm” of Fishing For Footage by Julia McGhee. (I use the term “engineering” loosely, especially in this context!)

The barn.megaparsec measuring spoon

Barn.Megaparsec measuring spoon.

A Barn is a unit of area used in particle physics, specifically particle accelerators like the LHC. It’s roughly the cross-section of a Uranium atom.

A Barn is pretty damn small.

A parsec is a unit of length used in astronomy, it’s roughly 3.26 light years, most of the way to the nearest star other than the Sun. A megaparsec is a million parsecs, which is nearly twice the distance to the Andromeda galaxy (at the time of writing…it’s heading towards us…)

A parsec is pretty damn big.

So what happens when you create a volume by multiplying them? A disc a barn across, extended into a cylinder a megaparsec long? You get a pretty useful measuring spoon, about 3ml.

STL file is here

Blender file is here