Category Archives: Video

The Moon: changing its appearance nightly depending on numerous factors but nonetheless entirely predictable. To wit:

As the Moon orbits the Earth, the half illuminated by the Sun first becomes increasingly visible, then decreasingly visible. The featured video animates images taken by NASA’s Moon-orbiting Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to show all 12 lunations that appear this year, 2021. A single lunation describes one full cycle of our Moon, including all of its phases. A full lunation takes about 29.5 days, just under a month (moon-th). As each lunation progresses, sunlight reflects from the Moon at different angles, and so illuminates different features differently. During all of this, of course, the Moon always keeps the same face toward the Earth. What is less apparent night-to-night is that the Moon‘s apparent size changes slightly, and that a slight wobble called a libration occurs as the Moon progresses along its elliptical orbit.

(Video: Data: Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter ; Animation: NASA‘s Scientific Visualization Studio; Music: Brandenburg Concerto No4-1 BWV1049 (Johann Sebastian Bach), by Kevin MacLeod via Incompetech)

apod

A grotesquely compelling time-lapse short by Austrian animator/motion designer Christian Stangl featuring various succulent things gasifying and transforming into crispy remnants over the course of days and weeks.

Mmm. Crispy remnants.

More of his dark oeuvre here.

colossal

A short film by Brett Novak featuring the balletic old-school skills of Brazilian longboarders Sara Watanabe, Ana Maria Suzano, Beatriz Gavelak, and Teresa Madeline.

Well worth going full screen for.

kottke

https://vimeo.com/493007374

The 2016 original (in case you missed it) and recently released second instalment of Fabrice Mathieu’s Hitchcock/Lucas mashup – the Cary Grant star vehicle that should have been but – for spacial and temporal reasons – never was.

You’ll recall his excellent pisstake of moon landing denial conspiracies ‘Moon Shining’.

curiousbrain

A Blender Animation short directed by Hjalti Hjalmarsson in which the background scenery of what appears to be a side scrolling game turns out to be recollections of the tragic past life of the protagonist as she sprints through the ‘stages’, turbo-boosted by shots of caffeine

awesomer

A vintage style monochrome stop-motion short by Belgian director Soetkin Verstegen who describes it as a “miniature cinema inside an ice cube”, inspired by the true story of a century-old box of negatives found preserved in the ice of Antarctica.

You’ll see.

shortoftheweek

An impressive animated video by Oskar Alvarado for a new tune by techno duo MachineCode (Dean Rodell and Current Value) – a science fiction future world loosely inspired by the ancient Mesoamerican myth of the serpent deity, Kukulkan.

awesomer

Behold: ghostly sprite lightning at 100,000 frames per second. But what is it?

Mysterious bursts of light in the sky that momentarily resemble gigantic jellyfish have been recorded for over 30 years, but apart from a general association with positive cloud-to-ground lightning, their root cause remains unknown. Some thunderstorms have them — most don’t. Recently, however, high speed videos are better detailing how sprites actually develop. The featured video, captured in mid-2019, is fast enough — at about 100,000 frames per second — to time-resolve several sprite “bombs” dropping and developing into the multi-pronged streamers that appear on still images. Unfortunately, the visual clues provided by videos like these do not fully resolve the sprite origins mystery. High speed vidoes do indicate to some researchers, though, that sprites are more likely to occur when plasma irregularities exist in the upper atmosphere.

(Video: Matthew G McHarg, Jacob L Harley, Thomas Ashcraft, Hans Nielsen)

Previously: No Sprite Is Safe

apod