Onelargeprawn
Created by German design studio, Kurzgesagt, this informative, minimalist animation takes us on a tour through the solar system, stopping off at each of the eights planets to provide a few factoids you may or may not know. The flat design and bright trendy colours belie a rather dark and inevitable truth…
[via FastCo]
As part of an all-sky astronomical survey, NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (or WISE) satellite took over 2.7 million images and beamed back 5 trillion bytes of data to eager astronomers back on Earth. This composite image is made up of 18,000 images covering the sky and shows more than 560 million stars and galaxies! You’ll notice that the prominent Milky Way Galaxy runs horizontally at the centre of the map.
The mosaic image has an oval shape and that is because of the method used to render the 3D sky onto a 2D map.
The sky can be thought of as a sphere that surrounds us in three dimensions. To make a map of the sky, astronomers project it into two dimensions. Many different methods can be used to project a spherical surface into a 2-D map. The projection used in this image of the sky is called Aitoff, named after the geographer who invented it. It takes the 3-D sky sphere and slices open one hemisphere, and then flattens the whole thing out into an oval shape.
Have a look at the full image after the jump.
Terje Sørgjerd and Randy Halverson are my two favourite time-lapse photographers. We posted about both of them in the past, and just a few days ago Halverson published his latest video, Temporal Distortion.
Using his custom rig, he shot in central South Dakota, Utah, and Colorado capturing the night skies, aurorae, and the Milky Way. A meteor makes an appearance too, its so-called persistent train lingered in the frame for over 30 minutes but lasts a fleeting second in the video. Temporal Distortion is magical, have a look at it below.
For more technical details on how he created this most amazing video, visit Halverson’s website, Dakota Timelapse.
[via +Randy Halverson]
It’s a city of stars above our heads. The Milky Way is a galaxy that stretches a staggering 600,000 trillion miles from one end to the other. And in this National Geographic TV special, we are taken on a journey through the tumultuous moments in the history of the Milky Way, from the birth of this beautiful spiral galaxy all the way to its eventual death.
One of the images used in the documentary is the 800-million-pixel panorama of the Milky Way created by the Gigagalaxy Zoom project. As grand as the image is, it’s a side-on view of the galaxy that we see and astronomers use all manner of high-tech computer tools to work out what it would like if it were viewed from a bird’s-eye view. Watch part one of Inside the Milky Way below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsSGLmROQUw
Find the other parts after the jump, or you could just buy the blu-ray.
People like Randy Halverson make me want to go outside and do things. You may recall a video that he created some months back, showing the Milky Way rising up from behind the home where his father grew up – that was Plains Milky Way.
The Milky Way is yet again the subject in his latest time-lapse video, and is wonderfully complemented with changeable weather and striking summer storms. Once again, Simon Wilkinson from The Blue Mask provides an equally striking score. Join Halverson as he returns to the skies of South Dakota in Tempest Milky Way.
See more of Halverson’s photography on his website, Dakotalapse.
[via +Scott Beale]
Thanks to the light pollution, we city folk rarely get to see such beautiful scenes as Randy Halverson does. The photographer who runs on a farm in South Dakota, spent the month of May capturing the sky he sees every night.
Summer is reportedly the best time for North American residents to view the Milky Way, but Halverson had to fight off the cold weather and strong Dakota winds to snap the starry views and his favourite shot – the Milky Way rising up from behind the old home where his father grew up. He compiled hundreds of the best photos into a glorious 3-minute video, where one second of footage is about 14 minutes in real time. The musical accompaniment is wonderful too, experience Halverson’s Plains Milky Way below.
See more of Halverson’s photography on his website, Dakotalapse.
[via Mail Online]
Australian photographer and part-time astronomer Alex Cherney loves the ocean and the night sky. He captured his first long exposure of the night sky in 2009 and since then he has been captivated by that form of photography.
In this beautiful compilation video, Cherney stitches together time-lapse sequences of the dark night skies as seen over the Southern Ocean. It took him 1.5 years and 31 hours of footage to create Ocean Sky, and his efforts were rewarded at the STARMUS astrophotography competition where he was made the overall winner.
In this compilation see our Galaxy, rising and setting over the turbulent Southern Ocean, connecting the distant stars to that other fascinating interface, the ocean shore. In between the action comes from the scudding clouds and the only evidence of life, coastal shipping and the occasional aircraft darting through the night. Beyond our galaxy, its nearest galactic neighbours, the Magellanic clouds, rise high in the sky, while moonrise suddenly reveals the remarkable landscape of Australia’s south coast. All the sections of the competition are represented in this series of carefully composed images.
For more things astronomical, head over to Cherney’s website, Terroastro.
[via io9]
Everyone loves a good time-lapse video don’t they? Here is a wonderful one created by photographer Daniel Lowe around the Outer Banks of North Carolina, USA. The Outer Banks is known for its temperate climate, expansive beachfront, and the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse which, incidentally, was made from over one million bricks.
Lowe’s video shows the night sky behind the lighthouse and surrounding islands, and he mentions that the light streaks shown in his Milky Way shots are actually shooting stars. It’s magical, see Low’s night motion time-lapse video below.
If you’d like to follow Lowe on Twitter, his profile is @Daniel_Dragon. He is on Facebook as well.
[via Lost at E Minor]
We wager this is the most impressive view of the night sky you’re likely to see today. In an effort to capture a 360-degree panorama of the heavens above, amateur photographer Nick Risinger set about a year-long project that he called Photopic Sky Survey, travelling the western United States and even hopping across the seas to our fair country.
60,000 miles later and having taken an astounding 37,440 exposures, Risinger has created the largest-ever photograph of the night sky. The whopping 5,000 megapixel composite image shows the Milky Way, the planets, and tens of millions of stars. In this image, Risinger says we’re taking a look back in time.
Large in size and scope, it portrays a world far beyond the one beneath our feet and reveals our familiar Milky Way with unfamiliar clarity. When we look upon this image, we are in fact peering back in time, as much of the light—having traveled such vast distances—predates civilization itself.
There is even an interactive, zoom-able view of the night sky where you can scan across the panorama and identify the various constellations, planets, and nebulae. See this most amazing image and more information about it at Photopic Sky Survey.
[via PetaPixel]
You may remember Norwegian photographer Terje Sorgjerd for The Aurora, a wonderful time-lapse video of Aurora Borealis. This time, the intrepid photographer happened to be visiting Mount Teide, the highest mountain in Spain and reportedly one of the best places in the world to capture the stars.
During the eight days that Sorgjerd spent there, he captured the beauty of the landscape around him and that of the stars above him. He even experienced a sandstorm during his filming. Have a look at his incredible time-lapse creation, The Mountain, below.
[via Oolex on Twitter]