This image is the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF). It was created by combining many images taken between 2002 and 2012 by the Hubble Space Telescope. The total exposure time was 22.5 days (almost 2 million seconds), and the image contains…

Recently, there has been much progress towards proving the twin prime conjecture, one of the great open questions in number theory. There are infinitely many primes, a fact that was already known by the ancient Greek. A short proof, although not the…

I have just posted a major update of my filter design tool. Go to the tool. The new version of the tool allows you to change the sampling rate away from the default of using normalized frequency (but beware of the caveats). Finally, you can also…

If you have ever seen a fireball, which is an unusually bright meteor (or shooting star), then you know that they can be very impressive. But did you also know that reporting your observation can help to further science? Fireballs, and meteors in general, are like…

Frequency response plots are often shown with normalized frequency on the X-axis. This sometimes confuses people. The normalized frequency is computed by dividing the true frequency by the sampling rate. Hence, the sampling rate itself has…

Before you can digitally process an analog (i.e., real-world) signal, you have to convert it to a digital form by sampling it. A very important aspect of this conversion is that you should avoid clipping the original signal. Clipping happens when…

This article is a wrap-up of what happened on TomRoelandts.com in 2014.

After mentioning Rosetta in June, there is another deep space mission that I want to bring to your attention. The final preparations for the flyby of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft have started. New Horizons will be…

After explaining how amplitude modulation works, the next step is Frequency Modulation (FM), which you might be more familiar with, since it is widely used for radio broadcasting. In practice, a carrier for FM broadcast radio would have…

Using modulation in radio communications is unavoidable. The simplest modulation technique is Amplitude Modulation (AM), where the amplitude of a carrier is varied according to the message that is to be transmitted. A carrier is…