Life in optical

It’s all about seeing our movement in space. The rotation is obvious – but then the Perseids add a wonderful sense of movement in one direction, and that’s exactly what it is: the Earth cruising through a dusty part of interplanetary space. Like driving through snowfall. The atmosphere is our windscreen but it’s not veery thick! Good thing the shooting stars themselves are no bigger than a grain of sand… :)

Joshua Tree Under the Milky Way from Henry Jun Wah Lee on Vimeo. Timelapse video of the Perseid Meteor Shower and the galactic core of the Milky Way as seen from Joshua Tree National Park. These were taken between August 12 and August 15, 2010. For more photos and words: Under the Milky Way. Gear: 5D Mk II, EF 16-35mm L. Settings: f/2.8, 6400 ISO, 20 second exposures. Music is Samskeyti by Sigur Ros

Tribute to Escher in Barcelona

I love this incredible visualization of a simulation of two galaxies colliding, and the comparaison with fantastic images of galaxy mergers taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

If anything, it really shows that our simulations seem to be a really good imitation of nature!

Sit back, and enjoy the dynamics of the cosmos :)

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the famous Pale Blue Dot picture. It was a collective revelation. The day we had to realise all of our egos fit into 3 pixels…

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Read more about the story of the Pale Blue Dot picture

And here is a talk in which Brian Cox tells us why the perspective the Pale Blue Dot gave us 20 years ago still matters today. Enjoy.

Basil from carolune on Vimeo.

Observations over a period of a week.
The yellow light is artificial light at night. The blueish light is daylight. In very cloudy weather, the brightness changes constantly, giving this flickering effect.
1 photo every 2 minutes, turned into a film@60frames/sec, resulting in ~ 2 hours per second. The first but is done with a macro lens (105mm), at fixed focus (adjusted once), but shallow DOF (1/f ~4.5), the other frames are taken at 1/f 8 with a 50mm lens and autofocus on. The point of focus is adjusted twice I think.