Saturn, Bringer of Old Age

 

This has been floating around on some of the blogs I frequent and I thought it would be a nice bit of brevity for anyone with a bad case of the Tuesdays. (Or as we call it here at Blue Lake: existence).

The footage, edited by Chris Abbas, is derived from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. According to the filmmaker:

The nature of the raw imagery is interesting; interspersed between the erratic, often chaotic frame sequences are long, majestic moments of graceful ring revolutions or slowly turning moons. This juxtaposition of erratic and graceful movements was something I wanted to play with and it was the criteria for my shot selection. It’s always an extremely difficult process when all your source imagery is beautiful to begin with. Thanks, Cassini. Thanks.

- The Atlantic

 

 

For more information on the Cassini mission check out NASA’s page here!

Artist: Gustav Holst/ Album: The Planets

Yo Trippin’

[via i09.com]

Today’s nerdy science photography post comes from Discover Magazine’s online album entitled—Far Out: The Most Psychedelic Images in Science.  Let’s just take a quick jaunt down the rabbit hole, shall we?

“A trip to the sun” (Image: NCAR)

“This sunspot is not real. It is, however, one of the best models of a sunspot ever made. Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research produced this simulation by plugging the newest sunspot data into a 76-teraflop supercomputer. The image required nearly 2 billion data points to simulate the magnetism, temperature, and other features of a sunspot; it models the phenomenon down to a depth of nearly 4,000 miles.”

“Psychedelic Smash-Up” (Image: CERN)

“This may look like a child's Spirograph drawing, but it's actually what scientists at CERN hope to see when the Large Hadron Collider in Europe reaches full smashing power: The decay of that elusive subatomic particle, the Higgs boson.”

 

“Spiral of Algae” (Image: Raymond E. Goldstein, University of Cambridge)

“The heart of this image is a spherical colony of Volvox algae, about 100 micrometers across, with a flurry of nutrients fluttering by. Volvox have been forming these multicellular colonies for more than 200 million years.”

 

 

“The Red Himalayas” (Image: NASA)

“NASA's false-color treatment of satellite images turns ordinary shots of our planet into pictures of another world worthy of science fiction, replete with purple oceans and orange outcroppings. This inverted treatment of the Himalaya Mountains was made with the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER), which combined near-infrared, red, and green wavelengths.”

 

Artist: Anastasia/ Album: Not That Kind