Misc. Ramblings

Here's my wallpaper for the week. It's a deep field mosaic image of the Orion Nebula.

Aloha!

Not much of interest going on right now so I'll leave you with this link to a digital images site that includes panorama shots made by combining several separate shots into one. I've shown one of his gigapixel images before but this link leads to his other works. Enjoy!

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My wallpaper for the week is from NASA and is an image of the Earth taken on December 7, 1972 by a member of the Apollo 17 crew. Apollo 17 was the last manned mission to the Moon. On December 14, 1972, at 22:54:37 GMT, man left the Moon and has not returned since.

You can follow the link above to the image page and download a higher resolution (2330 X 2527 17MB TIF file) if you like.

Have a Great Weekend Everyone - Aloha!

My wallpaper for this week is an image from the Cassini Orbiter. It's of Saturn's rings and was taken using the ultraviolet imaging spectrograph. Follow the link above and you get choose either the 254K jpeg or the 9MB tiff.

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My wallpaper for the week is of the Enterprise NX-01. There are five high resolution views from this model site here.

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My wallpaper for the week comes courtesy of Doc Searls and is a series of sunset shots taken near his home in Santa Barbara, California. Good stuff, even if you can see the air you breathe ;}

Way, way back when I was in high school [wasn't that during the mesozoic era" -ed.] I was a fan of Maurits Cornelis Escher (better known as MC Escher, no relation to MC Hammer - ed.). But this site here has gone one better and actually built models of some of his objects.

The thing is, some of the models look like the originals only from certain angles, which is logical since many of Escher's object could not exist in our reality. Hence, I'm not sure what point is trying to be made. Is it to show that some of them can be made? If so, so what? I dunno.

Still, it is interesting to look at and you can probably guess where my wallpaper for the week comes from...

There's a group of radio controlled aircraft enthusiasts who attach cameras to their planes. A bunch of photos have been posted at this site. Some of the pictures are quite good. Take a look if you are interested and have a broadband connection (or a lot of patience).

My wallpaper for the week (suitably stretched and squished for my monitor) comes from Yale University and the Hubble Space Telescope. The image indirectly maps dark matter clumps through light deflections made visible by a process called gravitational lensing (don't ask me because I don't know - ed.).

As a programming note, tomorrow is a state holiday (Prince Kuhio Day) so the next post won't be until Monday.

Have a Great Weekend, Everyone - Aloha!

It's the 15th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope so you know where my wallpaper for the week is coming from.

But to echo Aussie Don Armstrong's comments earlier about NASA and where it is going (or not going), how is it we can't find some money to keep the Hubble Space Telescope up there and creating science that is difficult, if not impossible, to do any other way?

What are our priorities? Why do we spend billions a year fighting wars but can't find the money to fund the only large, space-based telescope there is? Sigh.

My wallpaper for the week comes courtesy of the POVCOMP site. The "Persistence of Vision Raytracer" (POV-Ray) is a ray tracing program that provides the tools to make photo-realistic computer generated images. Versions are available for Windows, Mac OS X, and i86 Linux.

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I've pointed to mega-pixel images before but this site has 4,000 megapixel (i.e., 4 gigapixels) images. This translates to 88,000 X 44,000 pixels.

For those of you wondering who makes a digital camera with that kind of resolution, think again. They actually use a view camera with 9-inch by 18-inch film, then scan the film to digitize the image.

In looking at the images, the thing that strikes me is not the resolution, but the smoothness of the objects. It creates in some of the images an almost 3-D effect. No observable jaggies, banding, or other pixel noise is seen. This creates a smooth panorama that is next to being there.

Below is an image of the camera with the photographer next to it for scale.

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My wallpaper for the week comes from Abi Taylor's website where she is experimenting with macro-photography using her new Canon EOS 350d camera.

Although she says she's not an expert photographer, I think she is being too modest. A careful perusal of her photographs reveal a good eye for detail and composition. As she gets more experienced, she will get even better.

Gee, a new Canon camera. A new Motorola Razr V3 (in black, natch). A plasma wide-screen HDTV. Do I see a pattern here? ;>

In any case, if you have a few minutes, check out her site.

My next wallpaper for the week is from fellow Daynoter Phil Hough. Phil has been a regular at the photofriday site. The photo below is his latest submission.

Good job, Phil!

Have a Great Weekend, Everyone - Aloha!

I love astronomy images. I don't know why, but I do. You may have guessed as much given the number of times I've highlighted such images as my wallpaper for the week.

Well, here come another!

This one is of M8, also known as the Lagoon Nebula. The original is from NASA and can be found here. Enjoy.

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My wallpaper for the week comes courtesy of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It's an artist's rendering of what the new moon lander could look like. Maybe. Someday. But I wonder if it will be in my lifetime.

Apollo 17 landed on the moon on 11 December 1972. Seventy-five hours later, on 14 December at 22:54:37 UT, man left the moon and has not returned since. It is too soon to predict whether it is NASA, China, or a private agency that first makes it back. But I can say for sure that if someone doesn't at least try, we never will.

Have a Great Weekend, Everyone - Aloha!

There is a series of amazing scenic images of China brought to you courtesy of Feng Jiang. I had a hard time picking just one to show you but I think this one is representative of the stunning photos Feng takes. Enjoy.

The Orion Nebula is 1,500 light-years away, the nearest star-forming region to Earth. Astronomers used 520 Hubble images, taken in five colors, to make this picture. They also added ground-based photos to fill out the nebula. The ACS mosaic covers approximately the apparent angular size of the full moon.

It is unfortunate, for a telescope that is capable of such magnificent images, that its future is clouded by the small minded political priorities of those now in power in Washington. A pox on those who would drain funding for these kinds of efforts while approving millions for "bridges to nowhere." A pox on those who sustain and encourage a culture of corruption. A pox on those who can't see past their next illegal campaign contribution to gaze upward to the dazzling beauty of the heavens.

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I haven't done a wallpaper post for awhile so here ya' go. This is from the, now wait for it, the Lightning Photography site. The copyright holder has specifically allowed the non-commercial personal use of his amazing images so you are free to use them as your wallpaper. He is to be applauded for that since many web 1.0 people don't allow such personal use (even as they are helpless from doing anything effective about it and are actually hurting their business - but I digress).

In any case, it is interesting to see lightning going from cloud to cloud, rather than from cloud to ground. I had read that this occurs, but I don't recall ever having seen any pictures of it. This, and just about any other type of lightning can be found on Mr. Bath's site. A big thank you to him for his work and his reasoned stance on fair use.

Obviously, living here in Hawaii I'm kind of partial to the place. So when Doc Searls pointed to his nephew being a Marine serving here I followed the link. From there, I went to one of the nephew's photo sets and saw the photo of a helicopter taken from above while in flight. The photo is copyrighted so I can't show it here but you can follow this link. It is a unique perspective and I think a pretty cool shot. His nephew has a few more, including some night shots on the flight line with Kaneohe town in the background. Check it out if you have a few minutes. YMMV.

I found a new source of images for my PC's wallpaper. Check out the Wikipedia's Featured Pictures page for links to all kinds of images. Especially useful is the page with images formated just for wallpapers (although there aren't as many images there).

This week's wallpaper comes from Valuca's Photos. Specifically, the strange clouds gallery.

Have a Great Weekend, Everyone - Aloha!

This week's wallpaper comes from the unappreciated (at least by the political masters in Washington) Hubble Space Telescope. The image shows the after affects of two colliding galaxies.

The two spiral galaxies started to interact a few hundred million years ago, making the Antennae galaxies one of the nearest and youngest examples of a pair of colliding galaxies. Nearly half of the faint objects in the Antennae image are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars. The orange blobs to the left and right of image center are the two cores of the original galaxies and consist mainly of old stars criss-crossed by filaments of dust, which appears brown in the image. The two galaxies are dotted with brilliant blue star-forming regions surrounded by glowing hydrogen gas, appearing in the image in pink.

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My wallpaper for the week is the shuttle Discovery as it lit up the sky Saturday night on its way to the International Space Station. This is one of the images that NASA has up at their site.

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I haven't done a wallpaper of the week for awhile so here it is for this week. It comes courtesy of NASA and the US tax payers. Click on the image for a much, much larger version (2,766 by 1,364 pixels).

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This week's wallpaper is also from NASA. Clicking on the image will take you to a 6.4MB (3,000 X 2,400 jpeg) version:

This infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Helix nebula, a cosmic starlet often photographed by amateur astronomers for its vivid colors and eerie resemblance to a giant eye.

The nebula, located about 700 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius, belongs to a class of objects called planetary nebulae. Discovered in the 18th century, these colorful beauties were named for their resemblance to gas-giant planets like Jupiter.

Planetary nebulae are the remains of stars that once looked a lot like our sun. When sun-like stars die, they puff out their outer gaseous layers. These layers are heated by the hot core of the dead star, called a white dwarf, and shine with infrared and visible colors. Our own sun will blossom into a planetary nebula when it dies in about five billion years.

In Spitzer's infrared view of the Helix nebula, the eye looks more like that of a green monster's. Infrared light from the outer gaseous layers is represented in blues and greens. The white dwarf is visible as a tiny white dot in the center of the picture. The red color in the middle of the eye denotes the final layers of gas blown out when the star died.

The brighter red circle in the very center is the glow of a dusty disk circling the white dwarf (the disk itself is too small to be resolved). This dust, discovered by Spitzer's infrared heat-seeking vision, was most likely kicked up by comets that survived the death of their star. Before the star died, its comets and possibly planets would have orbited the star in an orderly fashion. But when the star blew off its outer layers, the icy bodies and outer planets would have been tossed about and into each other, resulting in an ongoing cosmic dust storm. Any inner planets in the system would have burned up or been swallowed as their dying star expanded.

So far, the Helix nebula is one of only a few dead-star systems in which evidence for comet survivors has been found.

This image is made up of data from Spitzer's infrared array camera and multiband imaging photometer. Blue shows infrared light of 3.6 to 4.5 microns; green shows infrared light of 5.8 to 8 microns; and red shows infrared light of 24 microns.

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I can go weeks, months even, without a new wallpaper. But this is just about the third week in a row that I have a new one. This week is a  collection of images taken by commission for Microsoft Vista by photographer Hamad Darwish. Although the images shown at the first link didn't make it into Vista, the first two at this link did.

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It's weekly wallpaper time. And as many instances before, it comes courtesy of the US taxpayers, NASA, and the Hubble Space Telescope. The image is of the Carina Nebula and is a 48-photo mosaic that displays a distance light years across.

Editor's note: This post was inadvertently left un-published until the day after this date.

I guess I'll never get tired of looking at astronomy images. This week I have NGC 2170. Enjoy.

Aloha!