Category Archives: Video

Extraordinary footage from the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter (which still hasn’t reached its closest distance to the sun) showing surface features of our star including phenomena called “campfires” – omnipresent miniature eruptions that could be contributing to the high temperatures of the solar corona and the origin of the solar wind – too small to have been captured by previous instruments.

And that’s not all. To wit:

“Right now, we are in the part of the 11-year solar cycle when the Sun is very quiet,” says Sami Solanki, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, and PHI Principal Investigator. “But because Solar Orbiter is at a different angle to the Sun than Earth, we could actually see one active region that wasn’t observable from Earth. That is a first. We have never been able to measure the magnetic field at the back of the Sun.”

It gets better. As the mission progresses, the Solar Orbiter’s image resolution capabilities will roughly double.

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Digital animations interpreting the trills, squads and coos of birds recorded during a visit to the Amazonian jungle by Austalian artist Andy Thomas, who tells Colossal:

I am fascinated with the idea of generating digital art that references the beauty and complexity of nature. I hope this piece will encourage people to research the many amazing varieties of birds that call the Amazon home, and remind us of how fragile and important this place is to us all.

Previously by Andy Thomas: Eye Candy: Synthetic Nature

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The extraordinary skills of 17 year old Japanese freestyle skateboarder Isamu Yamamoto, who won his first world Championship at the age of 11. Yamamoto’s own hero, Rodney Mullen – the US ‘Godfather of Street Skateboarding’ – sez of him:

The way he links his tricks together and the speed of them — it’s beautiful to watch. I would dare say that not many could do that, in that way, if they tried.

In fairness

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Ultra HD ‘footage’ of Mars created by panning (using the Ken Burns effect) across high definition panoramas composed of stills taken by various Mars rovers. It’s not video but it’s very engaging.

Full screen for best effect and, if you’ve turned down the volume, ElderFoxDocumentaries sez:

Although the cameras are high quality, the rate at which the rovers can send data back to earth is the biggest challenge. Curiosity can only send data directly back to earth at 32 kilo-bits per second. Instead, when the rover can connect to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, we get more favourable speeds of 2 Megabytes per second. However, this link is only available for about 8 minutes each Sol, or Martian day. As you would expect, sending HD video at these speeds would take a long long time. As nothing really moves on Mars, it makes more sense to take and send back images.

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