kottke.org posts about photography
Skydiver & musician Gabriel Brown and astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy teamed up to capture these incredible photos of Brown transiting the Sun while skydiving. You can see a video of the jump and some behind the scenes calculations on Instagram.
We had to find the right location, time, aircraft, and distance for the clearest shot; while factoring in the aircraft’s power-off glideslope for the optimal sun angle and safe exit altitude. Then we had to align the shot using the opposition effect from the aircraft (shout out to the pilot @jimhamberlin) and coordinate the exact moment of the jump on 3-way coms!
As if that wasn’t hard enough, we had a myriad of malfunctions that almost led to the shot not being captured… But as you can see, against all odds, we got it on the sixth try!
That sounds….complicated. But the results speak for themselves. More coverage of this on Petapixel and Colossal.
As Petapixel notes, the photos are composite shots:
After he captured the shot of Brown, he then made the image “super high-res” by shooting the Sun on another telescope and “assembled a mosaic of the entire Sun”, which he later matched with the features in Brown’s photo.
(thx, alex)
I began at the end. The Chōishi-michi pilgrimage route is an amazing 12-mile trail that winds its way up through the forest from the Jison-in temple in the town of Kudoyama in the valley to the Danjo Garan temple in the town of Kōyasan in the mountains. The origins of the trail date back to the founding of Kōyasan as a center for the esoteric Shingon school of Buddhism by Kūkai (aka Kōbō Daishi) in 819 CE. Legend has it that Kūkai used the trail to visit his mother; ever since, for some 1200 years, Buddhist faithful have been using the Chōishi-michi to worship in sacred Kōyasan. I was going to follow in their footsteps, for my own ends.
To climb up a mountain like a proper pilgrim, you need to start at the base. Seeing as my lodgings were already in Kōyasan, my journey began by a) catching the bus down a winding forest road; b) where I boarded a cable car for the ludicrously steep journey down to Gokurakubashi; c) where I got on an extremely local train; and d) finally disembarked at the Kudoyama train station and walked to the starting point. One hour and 30 minutes after I’d left my guesthouse, I stepped through the gate of the Jison-in temple. Now all I had to do was climb the entire 4100 feet of elevation back to where I’d started.
When establishing the Chōishi-michi some 1200 years ago, Kūkai marked the route with wooden guideposts, one every 109 meters. You don’t want your pilgrims getting lost — how are you going to find eternal salvation if you can’t even make it to the temple? The markers were replaced with more sturdy stone gorintō in the late 13th century. 180 of these stone markers are situated along the route from to Jison-in to Danjo Garan, along with another 36 markers from Danjo Garan to the Mausoleum of Kōbō Daishi in the Okunoin Cemetery. In the spirit of wayfinding, perhaps a map of my there-and-back-again route would be useful:
———
I was thankful for the frequent stone markers as I’d gotten a little lost on my hike the previous day. I was traveling on — or I was supposed to be traveling on — the Nyonin-michi pilgrimage route (Women’s pilgrimage route) and doing pretty well when I took a wrong turn right near the end.
This particular trail, though popular, wasn’t on All Trails and markers were sparse, so I was doing a lot of pinching & zooming of Google Maps and a PDF I downloaded from the internet. The trail curved right and I stayed straight, wondering why this bit of the trail was a little less blazed than the rest of it had been, and I popped out into the backyard of a temple. Oh no, I thought, I’m not supposed to be back here; only monks are supposed to be back here. I’m offending so many ancestors right now.
More pinching and zooming — ok, there’s a road off to the northwest. I set off and walked by what looked like some recent graves? The ancestors: so mad right now! What a disgrace of a pilgrim I am. I found myself crouching as I walked almost on tiptoe, trying to evade detection — even though the Buddha surely knew where I was and what I’d done. The road was just where the map said it would be; I slipped through a gap in the fence and followed it downhill for a quarter mile, not entirely sure I wasn’t still in a restricted area.
I came up on the other side of the temple and realized I’d stumbled into the backyard of Kōbō Daishi’s Mausoleum, where Shingon founder Kūkai entered into eternal meditation in 835 CE,1 aka one of the absolute holiest places in all of Japan, aka I am in deep, deep shit with the ancestors. Abandoning my plans for lunch, I entered Okunoin Cemetery through a proper entrance and made my way to the mausoleum. Wishing to make amends, I bowed at every bridge and threshold where everyone else was bowing and threw some coins into the saisen box.2 Many of the people around me were quite emotional about being there. The whole atmosphere just felt good, peaceful, numinous.
———
Ok, back to the Chōishi-michi, the big 12-miler. The first few miles felt almost straight up and then the trail leveled off for a while. The weather was cool but humid, so I hiked in shorts sleeves, sweating. It rained intermittently. Fog crept up the mountainside. I hiked though persimmon orchards; they’re in season right now. Small stands sold oranges & persimmons on the honor system. The path was well marked, not only with the stone gorintō but with well-placed signs in Japanese and English pointing the way to Kōyasan.
Walking the narrow path between the forest’s tall evergreen trees felt like entering a European cathedral with a towering vaulted ceiling. A bamboo forest earlier on the hike had a similar feeling; spaces such as these make you look up and feel whatever power or force or presence you believe in. You feel small and big all at once. The forest: unbelievably beautiful.
I heard voices through the trees and then the crack of something — was that a golf ball? Am I hiking through a golf course? The trail came to a clearing and lo, the tee for the 13th hole. The path also passed by vending machines,3 crossed roads, and zagged through tiny towns. The modern world, built up around this ancient trail.
I stopped for lunch around the halfway point: a sandwich, apple & custard pastry, and a small can of consommé flavored Pringles procured the night before at FamilyMart. FamilyMart is one of the big three convenience stores (konbini) in Japan — the other two are Lawson and 7-Eleven. Before you come to Japan for the first time, everyone tells you how amazing the konbini are: “You’re not going to believe this, but…” And then you get here and damn, they were right. The consommé Pringles were delicious.
After lunch: one foot in front of the other. Pilgrim mode locked in. Maybe I should become a monk, I think. I’m pretty good at being a pilgrim, the hiking part of it, I mean. I’m fine being alone with my thoughts. The clothes look comfy. I could be a monk with the internet at the center of my practice. Hours spent doomscrolling is kind of like meditation, right? It’s certainly a flow state of sorts, like the blood gushing from the elevators in The Shining. I’m into aesthetics. And I— oh, it’s ascetic? Ah. Maybe I’ll just stick to my secular life then.
Another stone marker. Another 109 meters. Keep going. I pass one every 90-100 seconds or so. Early on, the markers flew by; I didn’t even notice some of them. Now I’m searching them out ahead, peering up the slope I know (via All Trails) steepens sharply right at the end. Is this is the last one? No. But keep going. It’s damp, the rocks are wet. An inch of moss covers everything save for the well-worn pilgrimage path. It feels like a rain forest. Another stone marker. Another 109 meters. Keep. Going.
I sense the top of the hill — something about the light changes. I see a guardrail ahead. Emerging on the side of the road, I cross it and make for the Daimon gate, the traditional entrance into town. On the threshold, I bow deeply. Stepping over, I pump my fist in the air — I’ve made it back to Kōyasan.
———
A weary pilgrim deserves a hot bath. My guesthouse is a further few hundred feet. The woman who runs it is very nice and a little kooky; I like her. After the sacred backyard debacle the other day, I told her about all the ancestors I’d offended. She chuckled and told me, the ancestors, they don’t mind so much. She cooked me breakfast (delicious, nutritious) every morning — you don’t look like a tofu person, she said, eyeing me. Correct.
On my last morning, I asked her about a bunch of boxes stacked on a table. I have an interest in incense, she said. Apparently it’s quite involved and the most skilled practitioners are equal in expertise to those who do the chadō tea ceremony. She opened one of the boxes and showed me a very expensive twig of charcoal, which is so special that they sell it by the stick. When the charcoal burns, it does so purely, without giving off any gases or sparking or spitting. Afraid she’s trapped me into politely listening to her going on about her hobby, she checks in: are you actually interested in this? My turn to chuckle; personally & professionally, I’m interested in all sorts of things, even fancy charcoal.
The guesthouse has a kick-ass bathtub, deep and quick-to-fill. My host keeps a selection of bath salts and I select a yuzu one. Tired but happy and fulfilled, I soak a long while, easing the pain in my aching feet & back, the yuzu scent filling my pores.
———
After bathing, I set out to finish my journey. I’d previously walked the length of town to the Okunoin Cemetery and back a couple of times, but I wanted to do the whole thing in one day: from Jison-in temple to Kōbō Daishi’s Mausoleum at the far end of the cemetery, a proper pilgrimage. Well, not quite proper…because I was tired from my hike, I caught the bus instead of walking. The quest is the quest, whatever it takes.
Okunoin Cemetery is one of the most breathtaking and magical places I’ve ever been. Imagine a redwood forest like Muir Woods with Buddhist temples and a 1200-year-old cemetery with tens of thousands of faithful buried in it. The soaring trees create that cathedral effect and even an atheist like me can’t help but feel holy in the presence of so many souls, including Kūkai/Kōbō Daishi himself.
I hopped off the bus and started into the cemetery. Night had fallen and it was quite dark; should I have brought my headlamp? Ah, no need…the way is lit by hundreds of lanterns lining the path at about shoulder height. There are also some brighter, taller lights, a concession to safety I suspect. They’re the wrong temperature though, a rare misstep in a country with an unrivaled collective attention to detail. Whereas the lanterns glow with a pleasant amber light, these safety lights are a cold, garish blue, a color as harsh to the eye as the word “garish” (or “harsh” for that matter).
Aside from a few other people, I’m the only one here at this hour. Why are my shoes. So! LOUD!!? Each footfall echoes about the whole place and the crunch of the sand on the wet pavement under my soles is deafening. Once again, I am disturbing the ancestors. I try to walk quieter but somehow that’s even louder? How is anyone supposed to be eternally meditating with all this racket going on? Definitely not monk material, neither me nor my cacophonous shoes.
What’s that noise?! Some kind of animal? Ok, I can still hear the faint sound of traffic on the nearby road and anywhere with automobile noise isn’t scary — dangerous perhaps, but not scary. I hear another noise, one that I can only describe as “probably bird but what if monkey?” Or maybe Ghibli monster? I gotta say, in case you didn’t know, Hayao Miyazaki sure nailed Japan. Hit it out of the park. Everywhere I go, I am reminded of his work: small food stalls, beautiful parks, tiny trucks, cute little train stations, forest paths — the just-so touches of Japan reflected and amplified by the meticulous and rich detail of Studio Ghibli’s work.
The cemetery oozes Ghibli energy; it is not difficult to imagine thousands of Miyazaki’s weird little guys hanging from every tree and lurking behind every gravestone. Buoyed by their benevolent presence, I make a full loop of the cemetery in the dark, all the way to Kōbō Daishi’s Mausoleum and back to the entrance again.
And then, not wanting to wait 25 minutes for the bus, I walked all the way back to my guesthouse again, stopping at a sushi place for dinner. When I poked my head through the door, there was one other customer, an old guy smoking a cigarette who gestured for me to join him at the communal table. A menu was produced; I ordered so much sushi. Baseball was on the TV in the corner — game 1 of the Japanese equivalent of the World Series. The old couple running the place brought me sake, six massive fatty tuna rolls, six even larger salmon nigiri, and a much larger bowl of miso soup than I was expecting. As the three of them chatted, we all watched the baseball and I finished everything they brought me. I’d walked a total of 17.5 miles and needed to replenish.
I rolled out of there around the 4th inning of the game, arigato gozaimasus all around, and limped the rest of the way back to the guesthouse with a full belly, full heart, and teeming mind — back to where I began, at the end, completely satisfied by one of the best, most fulfilling days I’ve had in a long time.
I’ve seen a bunch of these before, but it’s cool to scroll and get your tiny mind blown over and over again. Human cognition and perception is such a trip. (via neatorama)
The organizers of the Bird Photographer of the Year competition received more than 33,000 images for 2025’s contest; here are the winners and runners-up. Photos above by Franco Banfi, Francesco Guffanti, Tibor Litauszki, and Andreas Hemb.
If you have no idea what you’re seeing in that third photo by Tibor Litauszki, you’re not alone — even after reading the photographer’s description (courtesy of In Focus), I can’t figure it out:
It was January and nature had created some very interesting shapes in the saline lakes near Akasztó in Hungary. I sent up my drone and was looking for the right composition when a dozen geese suddenly flew into view. I immediately started taking photos and luckily everything fell into place — the composition as well as the geese.
And eagles? Huge monsters. Dinosaurs never went extinct. (via in focus)
A gem of a find by The Public Domain Review of a collection from the Rijksmuseum: photographs of plaster models of the Moon’s surface that were made from observations of the Moon through a telescope.
Peering through a self-made telescope, James Nasmyth sketched the moon’s scarred, cratered and mountainous surface. Aiming to “faithfully reproduce the lunar effects of light and shadow” he then built plaster models based on the drawings, and photographed these against black backgrounds in the full glare of the sun. As the technology for taking photographs directly through a telescope was still in its infancy, the drawing and modelling stages of the process were essential for attaining the moonly detail he wanted.
These are incredible; I love them so much. While Nasmyth’s models were spikier than the Moon’s actual surface, they still look amazingly realistic for something produced in the 1870s. (The 1870s!)
The book from which these were taken also contains this page, where Nasmyth seems to hypothesize that certain mountain ranges on the Moon (and Earth?) are formed by “shrinkage of the globe”:
You win some, you lose some. 🤷♂️
See also Henry Draper’s photographs of the Moon from the 1860s and 1870s.
Todd Weaver uses analog & in-camera experimental techniques to achieve subtly geometric and colorful surfing photographs. Of one of his photos, Weaver says:
This one was taken on my half-frame camera at my favourite place to surf, First Point in Malibu. The colour is a one of a kind. I don’t think I could repeat it in a thousand tries. The stripe is an artefact of my pre-exposing process.
You can find more of Weaver’s work on his website and Instagram. If you like these surf photos, you might be interested in getting a copy of Dream Weaver Journal Volume 2.
In the mid-70s, Mike Mandel traveled around the United States photographing photographers as if they were baseball players, capturing the likes of Imogen Cunningham, Ed Ruscha, William Eggleston, and Ansel Adams.
I photographed photographers as if they were baseball players and produced a set of cards that were packaged in random groups of ten, with bubble gum, so that the only way of collecting a complete set was to make a trade. I travelled around the United States visiting about 150 photographic “personalities” and had them pose for me. I carried baseball paraphernalia: caps, gloves, balls, a mask and chest protector, a bat, as well as photographic equipment, and made a 14,000 mile odyssey. Out of this experience came 134 Baseball-Photographer images. I designed a reverse side for the card which would allow for each photographer to fill in their own personal data that in a way referred to the information usually included on real baseball cards: Favorite camera, favorite developer, favorite film, height, weight, etc. I used whatever information each photographer provided me.
You can hear Mandel talking about the project in this SFMOMA video — the gum he included in the packages of cards was donated by Topps:
Watch video on YouTube.
You can find some of the cards on eBay for around $10-50 apiece and a complete set, signed by Mandel & Imogen Cunningham, can be had for $3,650. (thx, duncan)
The Network of Time is a project that links people together, in the style of six degrees of separation, by appearance together in photographs.
Every photo you take with someone else links you into the vast network of people caught together in images.
It’s a collage millions of pictures deep – every actor you’ve seen on screen, every politician you’ve seen in the news, almost everyone you’ve seen in a history textbook.
Network Of Time is the world’s first interactive snapshot of this network.
For instance, LeBron James can be linked to Joseph Stalin in just five photographs.
James appears in a photo with Canadian broadcaster George Stroumboulopoulos, who was photographed with former Canadian PM Jean Chrétien. Chrétien was in a photo with Queen Elizabeth II, who appeared in a photo with Winston Churchill, and Churchill was photographed with Stalin.
The Network of Time is conceptually adjacent to the Great Span.
Ron Miller is one of the most prolific sign painters in Detroit. Photographer Andrew Anderson has collected dozens of images of Miller’s signs from Google Street View.
Ron Miller has been painting signs since 1978. He loves adding color to the neighborhood with his work. He has no website, no email and works all by word of mouth in Detroit.
Anderson also made a map of the locations of Miller’s signs. And here’s the man himself:
(thx, jordan)
From Alan Taylor at The Atlantic, whose curatorial eye I’ve always admired, “a grab bag of curious and interesting historical images from the 20th century”, including photos of the world’s largest banjo, diving archery, death-defying photography, and underwater alligator racing.
A few weeks ago, a pair of icebergs drifted close to Innaarsuit, Greenland. Photographer Dennis Lehtonen captured the visit — you can see the photos on Instagram or in the Arctic gallery on his website. From Colossal:
A couple of weeks ago, Lehtonen and locals spotted an iceberg floating a few miles away, and even from the distance, he could tell it was large. Days later, it — actually a pair — slid into Innaarsuit, dwarfing the fishing village’s modest wooden houses.
The municipality was warned to be careful when on the coast and not to travel in large groups. Fragments occasionally broke off as the iceberg moved, creating a reverberating sound akin to thunder. Many locals also documented the phenomenon, despite being more accustomed to icebergs. “They would also tell me that this is the highest they have ever seen an iceberg rise above the houses,” Lehtonen says. “So it was definitely a special event.”
The images, especially the first one with the icebergs in the fog, reminded me of an alien visitation, like in Independence Day or, especially, Arrival. Cue the Jóhann Jóhannsson. (via colossal)
For years now, photographer Fujio Kito has been documenting cement playground equipment in Japan, often capturing them at night, lit up in captivating ways.
(via laura olin and present & correct)
Over at the Atlantic, Alan Taylor has collected a bunch of photos showing just how hard China is pushing on solar energy.
As the Trump administration’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” eliminates many clean-energy incentives in the U.S., China continues huge investments in wind and solar power, reportedly accounting for 74 percent of all projects now under construction worldwide.
74% of all solar & wind construction projects worldwide! This pairs well with Bill McKibben’s recent article for the New Yorker, 4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment.
People are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours. Solar power is now growing faster than any power source in history, and it is closely followed by wind power — which is really another form of energy from the sun, since it is differential heating of the earth that produces the wind that turns the turbines.
Here are some of the winners, finalists, and nominees from the 2025 BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition and their People’s Choice Awards. Photos by (from top to bottom): Simon Biddie, Kat Zhou, Zhou Donglin, Jonas Beyer, and Hitomi Tsuchiya.
A Ghost goby (Pleurosicya mossambica) conspicuously camouflages against coral. While small and unassuming, these cryptic fish are abundant and protein-rich, making them a critical part of reef food chains. But naturally, they’ve evolved to evade predators, the Ghost Goby in particular being partially translucent—allowing him to blend in perfectly with surrounding coral.
Photographer Kat Zhou was diving off the coast of Florida when friends alerted her to this female octopus and her eggs tucked into a pipe of some sort, perhaps a remnant of a shipwreck. Zhou returned four times, trying to capture the mother’s determination to protect her young when they’re most vulnerable. She hopes her work inspires empathy for marine life, including an animal whose behaviors differ wildly from our own but whose maternal instincts are entirely familiar.
The Caribbean reef octopus (Octopus briareus) pictured here broods just a few hundred large eggs. Once she lays her eggs, the female stops eating and guards her growing offspring day and night. Her babies will emerge as fully developed, miniature versions of their parents, ready to change color, squirt ink, hunt for food, and live as small but full-fledged octopuses in the shallow seas around the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Their mother, in contrast, having exhausted herself to ensure her offspring’s survival, will die shortly after they hatch.
Lemurs are remarkably lithe creatures. With long tails providing balance and powerful, slender limbs outfitted with opposable thumbs and toes, they move with ease through the craggy limestone spires of western Madagascar’s Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park. Still, leaping over a 30-meter (100-foot) ravine with a baby clinging to your back seems like a daring choice.
To capture this scene, photographer Zhou Donglin had to do some mountaineering of her own. Setting out before sunrise, Donglin spent an hour scrambling to the top of a rocky peak, praying that the elusive brown lemurs (Eulemur fulvus) would show. After a day of disappointingly distant sightings, Donglin finally found some luck as a small troop descended through a forest of stone, glowing gold in the late evening light.
A pod of Beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas) gracefully glides through the frigid waters of a broken fjord, their white forms contrasting against the deep, icy blue. As they move in unison, threading their way through the maze of shifting ice, they embody the resilience and adaptability needed to survive in the ever-changing Arctic.
At the southern tip of Kyushu, Japan, a Green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas) swims in a surreal scene just offshore of the volcanic island of Satsuma-iojima. The photographer attributes the fantastical colors to an “underwater aurora” composed of volcanic material, likely influenced by wind direction, water temperature, sunlight, and the tides. She notes that no single moment in the water during an aurora is the same thanks to these fluctuations, meaning this image is as dreamy as it is utterly unique.
(via my modern met)
In looking over the shortlist for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 competition, I thought about how I’ve seen thousands or even tens of thousands of incredible astronomical images and yet there are always new, mind-blowing things to see. Like this 500,000-km Solar Prominence Eruption by PengFei Chou:
Or Close-up of a Comet by Gerald Rhemann and Michael Jäger:
Or Electric Threads of the Lightning Spaghetti Nebula by Shaoyu Zhang (Lightning Spaghetti Nebula!!!):
Or Dragon Tree Trails by Benjamin Barakat:
Teasingly, the official site only has a selection of the shortlisted entries but if you poke through the posts at Colossal, PetaPixel, and DIY Photography, you can find some more of them. (via colossal)
Watch video on YouTube.
Death of a Fantastic Machine (aka the camera) is a short documentary on “what happens when humanity’s infatuation with itself and an untethered free market meet 45 billion cameras”…and now AI. It’s about how — since nearly the invention of the camera — photos, films, and videos have been used to lie & mislead, a trend that AI is poised to turbo-charge. Not gonna sugar-coat it: this video made me want to throw my phone in the ocean, destroy my TV, and log off the internet never to return. Oof.
The short is adapted from a feature-length documentary directed by Maximilien Van Aertryck and Axel Danielson called And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine (trailer). Van Aertryck & Danielson made one of my all-time favorite short films ever, Ten Meter Tower (seriously, you should watch this, it’s fantastic…then you can throw your phone in the ocean).
P.S. I hate the title the NY Times gave this video: “Can You Believe Your Own Eyes? Not With A.I.” That is not even what 99% of the video is about and captures none of what’s interesting or thought-provoking about it. However, it is a great illustration of one of the filmmakers’ main points: how the media uses simplifying fear (in this case, the AI bogeyman 🤖👻) to capture eyeballs instead of trying to engage with complexities. “Death of a Fantastic Machine” arouses curiosity just fine by itself. (via craig mod)
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is operational and will soon embark on its primary mission: to take a detailed image of the sky every night for the next ten years.
A powerful new observatory has unveiled its first images to the public, showing off what it can do as it gets ready to start its main mission: making a vivid time-lapse video of the night sky that will let astronomers study all the cosmic events that occur over ten years.
“As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But a snapshot doesn’t tell the whole story. And what astronomy has given us mostly so far are just snapshots,” says Yusra AlSayyad, a Princeton University researcher who oversees image processing for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
“The sky and the world aren’t static,” she points out. “There’s asteroids zipping by, supernovae exploding.”
And the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, conceived nearly 30 years ago, is designed to capture all of it.
These images will revolutionize how astronomy is done:
Astronomy is following in the path of scientific fields like biology, which today is awash in DNA sequences, and particle physics, in which scientists must sift through torrents of debris from particle collisions to tease out hints of something new.
“We produce lots of data for everyone,” said William O’Mullane, the associate director for data management at the observatory. “So this idea of coming to the telescope and making your observation doesn’t exist, right? Your observation was made already. You just have to find it.”
“Your observation was made already. You just have to find it.” I love that.
The Rubin team has released some images from the telescope’s initial run, to inform the public of what the project is capable of. In less than a half-day’s operation, the Rubin discovered 2,104 new asteroids in our solar system.
In about 10 hours of observations, NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory discovered 2104 never-before-seen asteroids in our Solar System, including seven near-Earth asteroids (which pose no danger). Annually, about 20,000 asteroids are discovered in total by all other ground and space-based observatories. Rubin Observatory alone will discover millions of new asteroids within the first two years of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Rubin will also be the most effective observatory at spotting interstellar objects passing through the Solar System.
Not bad, rook. The team has set up a dedicated image viewer for their massive images.
You can read more about the Rubin at The Atlantic, The Rubin Observatory Is a Cosmic Cathedral, written by Michael Jones McKean, the observatory’s artist in residence:
Rubin is also a rare scientific megaproject that feels excitingly relatable. Instruments such as particle accelerators, neutrino detectors, and even radio telescopes might command our awe, but they roam in realms far outside sensorial experience. At its core, Rubin is an optical telescope. This links it to a long continuum of prosthetic tools that help our bodies better do what they already do naturally — see and process light.
And a trio of videos on how the observatory works from BBC News, New Scientist, and astrophysicist Becky Smethurst.
Ok, having been all over the western Mediterranean for the past two weeks, I’m back. *sigh* Here, without comment or context (I know, I know), are some of the things I saw:
Not pictured: a bunch of amazing food we ate over the course of the trip.
I was reminded the other day of what a curated treasure trove of art 20x200 is. So I took a spin through their archive and pulled out some favorites. First up are these Always Choose Happy prints from Amos Kennedy (I also like his Book Lovers Never Go to Bed Alone prints):
I don’t think I’ve ever seen this solar eclipse photo from Carleton Watkins before. Wow:
Taken on July 29, 1878, Solar Eclipse by canonized landscape photographer Carleton Watkins powerfully, elegantly captures the exact moment the moon completely blocked the sun and cast a surreal shadow over the Earth. Watkins, known for his pioneering work depicting the American West, used this rare event as an opportunity to simultaneously experiment with photographic techniques and record a celestial occurrence. The piece’s resulting artistic and technical achievement is as sublime and awe-inspiring as the eclipse itself. It’s stunning that then, as now, eclipses humble us all by reminding us of our smallness in a vast and fascinatingly ordered universe.
Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii was a pioneer in color photography; he documented his native Russia in color from 1904 to 1915. Here’s his photograph of some flowers (lilacs? hydrangeas?):
We all might need some Rest right now:
I love the photographic work of Gordon Parks; this one is called Camp Fern Rock (archer):
If you’ve lived in NYC for any length of time, you can’t help but be a little bit curious and charmed by the now-abandoned City Hall subway station:
They also have a bunch of stuff from Jason Polan, this amazing eye test chart, prints of several works by Hilma af Klint, and the The Marvelous Mississippi River Meander Maps.
I’ve posted before about Charles Brooks’ fantastic series of photographs of the insides of musical instruments. Recently, Brooks had the opportunity to apply his technique to capture the innards of a particle accelerator.
Brooks says of the photo:
Despite being a scientific instrument, it behaves a lot like a musical instrument. Electrons pulse through this tunnel in tight, synchronized waves. The powerful magnets above and below make them undulate — just like the vibrating string of a fine cello — creating an intense X-ray beam used to probe hidden structures of our world.
As part of the project, accelerator physicist Eugene Tan converted the pulsing of the electrons in the chamber into sound, “letting us hear the movement of electrons at nearly the speed of light”.
Petapixel has a lot more on how this image was captured.
“This was an instant yes for me,” Brooks tells PetaPixel. “It ticked so many boxes: I’m always drawn to photographing hidden or complex spaces, and this was one of the most intricate objects I could possibly shoot.”
(via colossal)
The NY Times has a nice feature on NASA astronaut Don Pettit’s photography from his latest stay in space, a 220-day mission aboard the ISS.
Now, you know I like a good astronomical image (like the one above of an ISS sunrise), but the thing that really caught my eye was the video of Pettit’s experiment involving charged water droplets and a teflon needle:
Watch video on YouTube.
I could watch that allllll day long.
More Pettit: Swirling Green Aurora Captured From the ISS.
The life and work of photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge is the subject of a new graphic novel called Muybridge by Guy Delisle.
Sacramento, California, 1870. Pioneer photographer Eadweard Muybridge becomes entangled in railroad robber baron Leland Stanford’s delusions of grandeur. Tasked with proving Stanford’s belief that a horse’s hooves do not touch the ground while galloping at full speed, Muybridge gets to work with his camera. In doing so, he inadvertently creates one of the single most important technological advancements of our age—the invention of time-lapse photography and the mechanical ability to capture motion.
You can find Muybridge at Drawn & Quarterly, Amazon, or Bookshop.
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space 35 years ago and in celebration of that milestone, Alan Taylor collected some recent images from the Hubble, whose mission is still ongoing.
Whose Streets? Our Streets! is an exhibition of photos of protests in NYC taken from 1980 to 2000 by dozens of photographers.
New York’s streets were turbulent in the 1980s and 1990s, as residents marched, demonstrated, and rioted in response to social changes in their city as well as national and international developments. The profoundly unequal economic recovery of the 1980s, dependent upon investment banking and high-end real estate development, led to heated contests over space and city services, as housing activists opposed gentrification and called attention to the plight of thousands of homeless New Yorkers. Immigration made New York City much more diverse, but a significant proportion of white New Yorkers opposed civil rights and acted to maintain racial segregation.
Attempts to combat the high crime rates of the 1970s and early 1980s exacerbated concerns about police brutality, as innocent black and Latino New Yorkers died at the hands of the police. The culture wars wracking the nation had particular resonance in New York, a center of avant-garde art as well as of gay and lesbian and feminist activism, on the one hand, and home of the Vatican’s spokesman in the U.S., Cardinal John O’Connor, and a significant culturally conservative Roman Catholic population on the other.
The photos are grouped by subject: race relations, police brutality, war & environment, AIDS, queer activism, abortion rights, housing, education & labor, and culture wars. (via the morning news)
Photographer Joshua Rozells on his photo of our increasingly crowded night skies:
The light pollution caused by satellites is quickly becoming a growing problem for astronomers. In 2021, over 1700 spacecrafts and satellites were put into orbit. Light pollution caused by SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are the worst offenders because they are low Earth orbit satellites, and they travel in satellite trains. One can only assume the issue will exponentially increase in the next few years, with SpaceX alone intending to launch over 40,000 satellites in total. The space industry is almost entirely unregulated, with no limits on the amount of satellites that anyone is able to launch and there is currently no regulation in place to minimise the light pollution they cause.
On Saturday, millions of Americans flooded the streets of cities, small towns, and every other sized municipality in the nation to protest the illegal and damaging actions of the Trump regime. These photos published by a number of media outlets show the scale, enthusiasm, and creativity of these peaceful protests, in the US and around the world.
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