A kaleidoscopic short by motion designer Paul Catoera who ‘stumbled on some beautiful patterns while working with superformulas’.
Author Archives: Chompsky
The Milko
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Behold: the central band of the Milky Way reflected in a lake beneath the dark sky of Southern Australia last month. To wit:
Toward the right were both the Small (SMC) and Large (LMC) Magellanic Clouds, satellite galaxies of our Milky Way. Faint multicolored bands of airglow fanned across the night. Numerous bright stars were visible including Antares, while the bright planet Jupiter appears just above the image center. The featured image is a composite of exposures all taken from the same camera and from the same location within 30 minutes in mid-May from the shore of Lake Bonney Riverland in South Australia. Dead trees that extend from the lake were captured not only in silhouette, but reflection, while lights from the small town of Barmera were visible across the lake. In July, Jupiter and Saturn will rise toward the east just as the Sun sets in the west.
(Image: Will Godward)
For ten years now, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory has been capturing an image of Sol every 0.75 seconds from geosynchronous orbit around the earth. In this mesmeric hour long video, every second represents a day in the sun’s life, with various noteworthy events highlighted. To wit:
12:24, June 5, 2012 — The transit of Venus across the face of the Sun. Won’t happen again until 2117.
13:50, Aug. 31, 2012 — The most iconic eruption of this solar cycle bursts from the lower left of the Sun.
43:20, July 5, 2017 — A large sunspot group spends two weeks crossing the face of the Sun.
A high-end, 1/6th scale figure of everyone’s favourite bounty hunter and star of the best offering from the Star Wars universe since ‘Rogue One’. Complete with blaster, Amban sniper rifle, flame thrower gauntlet, multiple points of articulation and The Child (aka ‘Baby Yoda’).
Yours for €72+ from Medicom.
Previously: Your IG-11 Action Figure Has Arrived
(*Is what the headline would read if this was December 2020)
Behold the busy surface and inner orbit of Jupiter. There’s a lot going on. To wit:
Largest and furthest, just right of center, is the Great Red Spot — a huge storm system that has been raging on Jupiter possibly since Giovanni Cassini‘s likely notation of it 355 years ago. It is not yet known why this Great Spot is red. The spot toward the lower left is one of Jupiter’s largest moons: Europa. Images from Voyager in 1979 bolster the modern hypothesis that Europa has an underground ocean and is therefore a good place to look for extraterrestrial life. But what about the dark spot on the upper right? That is a shadow of another of Jupiter’s large moons: Io. Voyager 1 discovered Io to be so volcanic that no impact craters could be found. Sixteen frames from Voyager 1’s flyby of Jupiter in 1979 were recently reprocessed and merged to create the featured image. About 43 years ago, Voyager 1 launched from Earth and started one of the greatest explorations of the Solar System ever.
(Image: NASA, Voyager 1, JPL, Caltech; Processing & License: Alexis Tranchandon / Solaris)
Locals from Long An and An Giang provinces harvesting long-stemmed water lilies from inundated rice fields during the annual flooding of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, captured by photographer Trung Huy Pham.
Behold: Majestic Towers – all 80cm of it – a 450 piece laser cut acrylic HO-scale model of an art deco apartment building- showcased here by model railway builder Luke Towan, who further enhanced its miniature magnificence with deft paint-strokes, 3D-printed details and interior lights.
In fairness.
A slightly unnerving but clever product from designer Danielle Baskin (top) – Maskalike – soon to be launched machine washable cotton face masks with an image of the wearer’s own mug on the front for, you know, facial recognition.
If you don’t need your face to open your phone, you can have any image you like, including the ‘looking permanently uncomfortable, trying to be happy’ ‘Hide The Pain Harold’ meme (modelled by Danielle in the bottom pic).