Cities! Auroras! Lightning! One good use for the ISS
Michael König, Time Lapse Views of Earth from ISS, 2011. The music leaves a little to be desired, perhaps, but this is one wonderful video. Full-screen and hi-def it Here’s a little break from the regularly scheduled program, via the Bad Astronomer. As a big fan of robotic exploration of the solar system and space [...]
Art Sunday: NGC 474 and the coming galactic set-to
NGC 474. Credit: P.-A. Duc (CEA, CFHT), Atlas 3D Collaboration. Image source: Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). All the individual points of light are stars within our own Milky Way galaxy and are in the extreme foreground. The two galaxies are 10,000 times further away than the stars. There are some other galaxies in [...]
Job redux: Loss and the glory of the world meet in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life
Sean Penn as Jack in Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life. Penn works his world-weary visage to great effect in the film Don’t worry, there are no spoilers here. In fact, I’m having a hard time even imagining a spoiler for this film. I could tell you the whole thing and it wouldn’t change its [...]
Big Head Todd and the mass extinction problem
Todd Park Mohr of Big Head Todd and the Monsters recording at Ardent Studios in Memphis. I missed BHTM back in the 1990′s when they had their major-scale success; I blame graduate school for this. But a good friend introduced them to me several years ago and to this day I am grateful to him [...]
Art Sunday: Pia Stern’s wonderful way out
Pia Stern, Rondo for Galileo. Oil on canvas, 2004-05. Used with permission of the artist I’ve been thinking a lot lately and it has kind of worn me out. I tend to live in my head. There may be some good things about this, I don’t know. But it can be a real weakness, and [...]
So this guy eats some plums
The guy who ate the plums: William Carlos Williams‘s 1921 passport photo. Image source: Wikimedia Commons Look here to read William Carlos Williams’s poem This is Just to Say. Williams, the selfsame fellow who brought us the white chickens beside the red wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater, published this piece in 1934. What is it about? [...]
TBSP, Reznor style
Cassini Mission from Chris Abbas on Vimeo. Make sure to full-screen it and set it on HD. Read more about it here This is really a wonderful, hypnotizing look at Saturn (tbsp) and its flying circus of rings and moons. It really capitalizes on the beautiful (dare I say haunting) grayscale images that are a [...]
Art Sunday: Stories and numbers meet in the theater of the sky
Stanislaw Lubieniecki, Theatrum cometicum (The Theater of Comets). Amsterdam, 1666-68. Here, the sea monster Cetus seems ready to chow down on some comet. Image source: Out of this World from the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering, and Technology. The interested reader will also want to investigate Thinking Outside the Sphere, another fine online exhibition [...]
Art Sunday: Seven from Sister Wendy Beckett
Pia Stern, The Room of Longing (2008). “I saw the spirituality of her images right from the start,” said Sister Wendy of Ms. Stern’s work. Wendy’s enthusiasm for Ms. Stern made me curious, and today I’m a fan. See more of her work here. Used by permission of the artist. Click on image for a [...]
Art Sunday: The spectacular Mandelbrot Set
The Mandelbrot Set, named after one Benoit Mandelbrot, who spent years studying and popularizing it. We at psnt.net are grateful for Wolfgang Beyer, who created these beautiful images and freely released them for the world to enjoy. Source of all images: Wikimedia Commons It’s Art Sunday again! This week we bring to you the Mandelbrot [...]
