A new telescope called VISTA (for the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) has just been turned on at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, and has made its first release of pictures. From the ESO site:
VISTA is a survey telescope working at infrared wavelengths and is the world’s largest telescope dedicated to mapping the sky. Its large mirror, wide field of view and very sensitive detectors will reveal a completely new view of the southern sky. Spectacular new images of the Flame Nebula, the centre of our Milky Way galaxy and the Fornax Galaxy Cluster show that it is working extremely well.
On our last trip to Europe I was particularly impressed with some of the train stations we saw, Berlin’s central train station was amazing. This Design Boom post of striking subway architecture has some real beauties too.
Ok, I’m fairly obsessed with jellyfish and have always been a big Prince fan, but honestly, I’m not quite feeling this Prince/Jellyfish poser from a recent exhibition by Prince’s designer Anthony Malzone in San Francisco.
I love the new photography site Pictory put together by Laura Brunow Miner. It combines themed, high-quality, user-contributed photos with short narratives about each image. Check out the Overseas and Overwhelmed feature (25 true stories about culture shock) to get a taste of what’s to come here. I’ll be checking back often.
Not in this amazing stop-motion video put together by the New Zealand Book Council. This style of video-making seems to have had a resurgence in recent months, with a spate of Lego-based stop-motion clips making the rounds. This is the most impressive example I’ve seen so far.
Having always been fascinated with jellyfish, I’ve been eagerly watching the progress of Jellyfish Art as they work to make jellyfish aquariums a viable consumer item. The tricky part is apparently designing a system that doesn’t suck the jellies into the filter. This $2400 40-gallon Monaco model is still too rich for my blood (and the $250 desktop model looks too small), but I’m hopeful that in a couple of years these will come down enough to warrant making the plunge. The color-changing LED lights are a nice touch.
This series of car-less highways and streets in the Los Angeles area is the brainchild of photographer Tom Baker. When we’re down there next week it’ll be just like this, right?
This is a really nice collection of jellyfish photos taken by Italian photographer Guido Mocafico. Actually, all of his galleries are worth a look, I quite liked his snake photos too.
It may seem like it’s one big Rock Band party around here, but really we don’t spend *that* much time in the basement jamming to video games. In what I promise will be my last Rock Band post for awhile (I won’t even get into the upcoming Rock Band for iPhone app or how cool the Iggy Pop and David Bowie LEGO Rock Band characters are), I had to point to these totally cool opening and closing videos and interstitial segments from the Beatles Rock Band title that BoingBoing has nicely posted.
As Brandon Boyer points out, these beautiful bits turn the video game into a virtual interactive documentary. I ooh’ed and ahh’ed over the opening video sequence of The Beatles: Rock Band along with the entire internet when it was released a month or two ago, but I like these interstitial segments created by MK12 just as much. Click through to the BB post and watch them all, as well as the intro and outro video sequences if you haven’t seen them yet. If it doesn’t make you put some Beatles music on the stereo, you’re a stronger man than I.
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