Category: Photography

Teide Sky Trails

Posted by Nexus – 13/02/2010

[via APOD]


The snow capped Teide volcano is reflected in a pool of water in this nearly symmetric night sky view from the Canary Island Tenerife.

Bright north star Polaris stands above the peak in an exposure that also captures the brilliant trail of a polar orbiting Iridium satellite.

Of course, with the camera fixed to a tripod, the stars themselves produce concentric trails in long exposures, a reflection of the Earth’s rotation around its axis.

Large astronomical observatories also take advantage of the calm Canary Island sky.

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Night Launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour

Posted by Nexus – 09/02/2010

[via APOD]

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Sometimes, the space shuttle launches at night. Pictured above, the space shuttle Endeavour lifted off in yesterday’s early morning hours from Launch Pad 39A in Kennedy Space Center, Florida, USA, bound for the International Space Station (ISS). A night launch, useful for reaching the space station easily during some times of the year, frequently creates vivid launch imagery.

The shuttle, as pictured above, is framed by an enormous but typical exhaust plume ejected as the shuttle’s powerful rockets began lifting the two million kilogram space bus into Earth orbit. Endeavour’s mission, labelled STS-130, includes the delivery of the Tranquility module to the space station.

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A Sun Halo Over Cambodia

Posted by Nexus – 09/02/2010

[via APOD]

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Have you ever seen a halo around the Sun? This fairly common sight occurs when high thin clouds containing millions of tiny ice crystals cover much of the sky. Each ice crystal acts like a miniature lens. Because most of the crystals have a similar elongated hexagonal shape, light entering one crystal face and exiting through the opposing face refracts 22 degrees, which corresponds to the radius of the Sun halo.

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Hong Kong Sky

Posted by Nexus – 07/02/2010

[via APOD]

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This remarkable scene combines multiple exposures recorded on the evening of January 18th from a waterside perspective in Hong Kong, China. It follows a young crescent Moon, with brilliant planet Jupiter to its left, as they set together in the western sky. Their two luminous trails are faintly paralleled by trails of background stars.

But easier to pick out are the short, bright airplane trails converging toward the horizon and the Hong Kong International Airport that seem to offer a frenzied imitation of the celestial tracks. Of course, the reflection of city lights and boat traffic follows the water’s surface. Streaking car lights define the span of the cable-stayed Ting Kau bridge.

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Mars and a Colorful Lunar Fog Bow

Posted by Nexus – 03/02/2010

[via APOD]

Even from the top of a volcanic crater, this vista was unusual. For one reason, Mars was dazzlingly bright two weeks ago, when this picture was taken, as it was nearing its brightest time of the entire year.

Mars, on the far upper left, is the brightest object in the above picture. The brightness of the red planet peaked last week near when Mars reached opposition, the time when Earth and Mars are closest together in their orbits.

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Lake Macquarie Sunset (widescreen)

Posted by Nexus – 26/01/2010

[via deviantart.com]

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Millennium Annular Solar Eclipse

Posted by Nexus – 23/01/2010

[via APOD]

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The Moon’s shadow raced across planet Earth on January 15. Observers within the central shadow track were able to witness an annular solar eclipse as the Moon’s apparent size was too small to completely cover the Sun. A visually dramatic ring of fire, the annular phase lasted up to 11 minutes and 8 seconds depending on location, the longest annular solar eclipse for the next 1,000 years.

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Another Reason To Avoid Giant Megapixel Point-And-Shoot Cameras

Posted by Nexus – 23/01/2010

[via consumerist.com]

Photo by usblsb

By now you hopefully know that more megapixels don’t necessarily make a better camera. For one thing, you can almost double the megapixels of a camera while only gaining about a 40% increase in resolution. For another thing, it takes a lot more than just sheer number of pixels to produce a decent image. Nevertheless, point-and-shoot cameras with ginormous megapixel stats (now topping 12 MP) continue to hit the market. But Ross at Petavoxel says there’s another reason to avoid huge MP point-and-shoot cameras: something called the Airy disk.

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