A rare and spectacularly vivid 30-image panorama of the central band of the Milky Way galaxy observed by photographer Nicholas Buer from the darkness of Laguna Cejar in Northern Chile last October.
Full image here.
Category Archives: Nature
Going Up?
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Behold: the world’s tallest outdoor lift – the 326m (1,070 feet) Bailong Elevator at Zhangjiajie National Forest Park in China.
Completed in 2002, the lift takes two minutes to convey 50 passengers at a time up a sandstone cliff face to overlook the historic site of Wulingyuan and the rock formations that inspired the Hallelujah Mountains of Pandora in James Cameron’s Avatar.
The System
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An incredible composite image by astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy combining telescopic photographs of the planets, our moon, the sun and the International Space Station lined up against the backdrop of the Milky Way.
MORE: Astrophotographer Creates Incredible Photo of the Solar System from His Backyard (My Modern Met)
Deep Leaf
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A fascinating animated flying tour of the translucent interior of a Redwood leaf to see photosynthesis at the molecular level, courtesy of the California Academy Of Sciences.
Australia is a continent, in fairness. The work of cartographer David Garcia.
Curse you, Mindanao.
Explore it in detail here.
MORE: It’s Not Easy to Map the 100 Largest Islands in the World (Atlas Obscura)
An animation showing the 1.255 light second distance between us and the moon (the Sun is about 8 light minutes from us) created by planetary scientist Dr. James O’Donoghue using NASA imagery. and that’s not all. To wit:
This is the distance between the Earth and Moon with the correct sizes and scales. The real-time speed of light is also shown.
(Image: ‘Moonrise over Earth’ by Detlev Van Ravenswaay)
Orbital
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Public content images taken from the International Space Station collated into a meditative time-lapse tour of the globe by photographer and video artist Bruce W. Berry Jr.
Full screen for best effect.
The Prachov Rocks natural reserve, 5km west of Jičín in the Czech Republic – a spectacularly beautiful sandstone plateau that will be curiously familiar to wanderers of to the mystical RPG vistas of The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim.
Pictures 1 and 2 are from the game, the rest are real.
(Pix: Steve Coleman)
Mirkwood
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Wistman’s Wood – a forest of lichenated dwarf oak trees on the eastern slopes of the West Dart River in southern Devon.
Described as ‘the most haunted place on Dartmoor’ and captured above in all its mystical gloom by Neil Burnell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS8KA7Mayho
The sidereal days and axial tilts of Mercury-to-Neptune compared in an animation by Dr. James O’Donoghue using NASA imagery.