Over the years I’ve accumulated heroes; people I look up to and admire both for their work and their conviction to what they believed in and worked for.  Foremost of these for me w0uld be Carl Sagan whose visionary belief, not just in science, but in mankind itself, gave voice to the historical achievement of humans as a species and a beautiful, reconnecting position for all of us to take on this planet and amongst the stars.

Today (or rather, yesterday…  time zones and relativity and what not aside) marks what would have been his 77th birthday; and his wisdom, insight and love is still missed.

Shot on a 5D mkii around Arizona, these HDR time-lapse images are straight up gorgeous.  While I love and loath the overuse these days of John Murphy’s Sunshine (Adagio in D Minor), it gets a full pass this round based on how appropriately used it is here.

I should also stress: be sure to check it out in full HD too.

Nearing the end of an exhausting two weeks of work and have been juggling multiple roles from designer to editor to camera operator to…  hell, I can hardly remember what now.  This is the third night in a row of getting home at 2am and just one more day to go

Much too tired to post anything proper tonight, so here’s a picture of the Earth and Moon from 6 million miles away.

Slacked a bit on the posts last week and still have to do one on 48 hours at some point soon.  Things have just been pretty busy and mental at the mo.

In the meantime…  behold this very impressive timelapse footage of the night sky, shot around the Very Large Telescope in the Atacama, Chile.  Gorgeous.

This is totally freakin’ cool…

Amateur astronomer Nick Risinger travelled across the globe to capture the night sky on a special camera rig and create this 5000 megapixel, 360-degree interactive view of the Milky Way and more than 20 million stars.

Composed of 37,440 images, this giant image provides a high level of detail to our night sky and for me, gives another alarming call to how bad light pollution is getting at night.

Anyhow, to check out the interactive awesomeness, go to https://skysurvey.org/

One thing I’m quickly discovering about having this blog again is that I don’t feel so guilty about always closing so many tabs at the end of a web surfing session and I finally have an excuse to clear out my bookmark folders which is so backed up, it’d make the Collyer brothers blush.

Anyway, here’s some articles…

Citizen Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick’s films were landmark events – majestic, memorable and richly researched. But, as the years went by, the time between films grew longer and longer, and less and less was seen of the director. What on earth was he doing? Two years after his death, Jon Ronson was invited to the Kubrick estate and let loose among the fabled archive. He was looking for a solution to the mystery – this is what he found.

One bit in particular I loved…

(In fact, I soon discover, Kubrick did write back to fans, on random, rare occasions. I find two replies in total. Maybe he only ever wrote back twice. One reads, “Your letter of 4th May was overwhelming. What can I say in reply? Sincerely, Stanley Kubrick.” The other reads, “Dear Mr William, Thank you for writing. No comment about A Clockwork Orange. You will have to decide for yourself. Sincerely, Stanley Kubrick.”)

Also…

China unveils rival to International Space Station
The project heralds a shift in the balance of power among spacefaring nations. In June, the US space agency, Nasa, will mothball its whole fleet of space shuttles, in a move that will leave only the Russians capable of ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The $100bn (£60.5bn) outpost is itself due to fly only until 2020, but may be granted a reprieve until 2028.

Spaaaaaaaace.  It’s awesome. There’s also a further write up on the facts at bad astronomer here.  And finally…

Zaarly Makes It Possible To Buy Pretty Much Anything
That’s where Zaarly comes in. Zaarly is an almost shockingly simple app that lets you list whatever it is you’re looking for, be it a set of 17th century porcelain shepherdesses, tickets to an Evanescence concert, reservations at a fully booked restaurant or whatever else you can imagine paying for the privilege of having. Zaarly makes it so that anything–object, experience or otherwise–can be for sale.

This beautifully shot time-lapse video of the Milky Way galaxy shot a top of El Teide, Spain’s highest mountain.  With it’s high altittude (3718m) and lack of moisture, the images this guy has gotten are pretty damn amazing.

A large sandstorm hit the Sahara Desert on the 9th April () and at approx 3am in the night the sandstorm hit me, making it nearly impossible to see the sky with my own eyes.

Interestingly enough my camera was set for a 5 hour sequence of the milky way during this time and I was sure my whole scene was ruined. To my surprise, my camera had managed to capture the sandstorm which was backlit by Grand Canary Island making it look like golden clouds. The Milky Way was shining through the clouds, making the stars sparkle in an interesting way. So if you ever wondered how the Milky Way would look through a Sahara sandstorm, look at 00:32.

Be sure to check it out.

Naked Man in Wrong Room
The man told police he been brought back to the hotel from town by a woman but at some point wandered out of her room into the hall stark naked.
” He then wandered into another room, occupied by a husband and wife, had curled up and gone to sleep, he said.” [full article]

Spy probe images Apollo landing sites
NASA’s newly launched Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has snapped images of hardware left on the moon by the Apollo astronauts… [full article with gallery]

Giant ‘soap bubble’ found floating in space
It looks like a soap bubble or perhaps even a camera fault, but the image at right is a newly discovered planetary nebula. [full article]

NASA Wants To Move The Earth
Scientists have found an unusual way to prevent our planet overheating: move it to a cooler spot.
“All you have to do is hurtle a few comets at Earth, and its orbit will be altered. Our world will then be sent spinning into a safer, colder part of the solar system.” [full article]

My brother sent me a video this week of a 3D render of the galaxies imaged in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (wikipedia entry): a series of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope between 2003 and 2004 that looks back approximately 13 billion years ago and images about 10,000 galaxies.

Not stars mind you. Galaxies. Each one possible of holding billions or trillions of star systems.

And this wasn’t through a big patch of the sky either, but in a tiny region of space the size of a square millimeter held a metre away from your eye. That leaves out 12.7 million single cubic millimetre patches of sky that possibly yields some similar results.

Like the following video says, all those figures are too huge of a figure to just compute in the human brain. And I’d agree.

I read of this image being taken some years ago, but it wasn’t till about a year ago when I stumbled across this image file that compares the scale of our solar system to that of the known universe and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field itself, that I had the pleasure of properly getting my brain’s nutsacks blown off.

It’s a big file (approx 1.5megs), so I’m not gonna post it here directly, but check it out and scroll through from the top and It’ll be sure to put some decent insignificance spice into your food for thought soup. Trivial things happen every day and our lives continually shift because of it, but with a little science, it’s pretty easy to put things into perspective of how tiny we all really are and blah, blah, blah, the existential thinking, just check out what I’m talking about here.

Anyway, going back to the original point of it, here’s the video and a full in depth examination article of the Ultra Field worth checking out here.

Ryan Adams was great. Though I’m not the biggest fan of his latest album, he still put on a great show and played a lot of personal favourites from previous albums. Well worth it.

I’m not going to Kings of Leon and just to save my sanity for that decision, I’ve convinced myself that they won’t play as many of their awesome songs from Aha Shake Heartbreak (which I still love and play constantly) and will instead perform more from their later albums which are nice, but not as awesome.

Meanwhile what I’m really looking forward to is The Kills in March. I just love this duo and their album Midnight Boom was one of my favourites of last year. Should definitely check it or… fuck, anything of theirs.

So onto the interesting stuff of the internet…

Is the Roman Pantheon a colossal sundial?

During the six months of winter, the light of the noon sun traces a path across the inside of the domed roof. During summer, with the sun higher in the sky, the shaft shines onto the lower walls and floor. At the two equinoxes, in March and September, the sunlight coming in through the hole strikes the junction between the roof and wall, above the Pantheon’s grand northern doorway (see diagram). A grille above the door allows a sliver of light through to the front courtyard – the only moment in the year that it sees sunlight if its main doors are closed (see diagram). [full article]

Alien world is slimmest and fastest known

Astronomers have found an extrasolar planet with the smallest diameter yet measured – it is no more than twice as wide as Earth. The rocky body is also the fastest known, whipping around its star in less than a day. [full article]

Giant Titanoboa snake ruled the earth after the dinosaurs

It weighed 1.25 tonnes and with a length of 45 feet or more it would have been able to take on and eat pretty much any other animal it came across.

The newly discovered type of snake, named Titanoboa in honour of its immense size, was for 10 million years the largest land predator on earth.

At least 28 individual specimens have been uncovered in Colombia and, with all of them being around 40 feet long, researchers said it is likely the species could have reached much further than 45 feet. [full article]

Bill Gates Unleashes Mosquito Swarm

TED, the annual gathering of the most pretentious people from the fields of technology, entertainment, and design, just got punk’d. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates released a swarm of mosquitos into the crowd.

Ending malaria is a particular passion of Gates’s, whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent millions fighting the disease. But he apparently didn’t feel like TED attendees were taking the threat seriously. “Not only poor people should experience this,” Gates said as he let the bugs loose on his audience. [full article]