Saturday, May 28, 2016

The Milky Way



The Milky Way Over the Oregon Coast (click to enlarge)





















"Stars over the sunflower" SE Queensland, Australia (click to enlarge)

10 comments:

chickelit said...

I never really cared for those oil-on-black-velvet paintings.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Repeating radio signals coming from a mystery source far beyond the Milky Way have been discovered by scientists. While one-off fast radio bursts (FRBs) have been detected in the past, this is the first time multiple signals have been detected coming from the same place in space. Link

ET phone home

Chip Ahoy said...

What would photography be without high dynamic range? And will we ever be able to appreciate a regular ol' star-blasted sky?

A clear Breckenridge night will explotar su mente.

Because there's like no atmosphere to speak of and like you're a whole mile closer. And you're thinking, "If it weren't for all these f'n pine trees all over the place closing in I'd be able to see something spectacular up there."

Arizona Highway is now almost completely HDR.

It's done a couple a way.

Professional way 1 is by using the camera's ability to take a series of photos in a row with f-stop variations between so each photo is a set of photos with slightly different settings allowing whiter whites and blacker blacks and mid-ier mid-tones for all colors.

Way 2 is by post-processing in RAW form, using the sliders to extend the usual range.

Way 3 is post processing stacking. A photographer for Arizona Highways said his nighttime cactus and starry sky photograph is a stack of 13 photographs.

Those are the 3 that I know about. And IT SNOT FAIR !





Methadras said...

Lem, think about how people think of the universe in terms of the speed of light. The FRB's are signals from so far away that we are just seeing/hearing them now after thousands if not billions of light years away. They are no more. This is all we get from them. What's amazing about the universe in terms of it's size, it's span, and what's in it, is that even though the speed of light is the fastest medium we have to observe it, and essential component that is often missing is the speed of thought. In that what is happening on the other side of the universe right now. Not at the speed of light, but if you project your thought to what could be happening there this very instant, you then have a different scheme by which you observe the universe. Quantum entanglement seeks to sort of bridge that gap, but it's on the sub-atomic scale, not on the macro scale that you and I exist in.

Just think about it. In a universe that is roughly 50 billion light years across and growing, the only way to know what's happening beyond your immediate space is to project your thoughts towards it. Everything we see is in the past, from the light entering our eyes right now, to when we look out in space. There is effectively no present, yet we are dragged through the future to it.

chickelit said...

Repeating radio signals coming from a mystery source far beyond the Milky Way have been discovered by scientists. While one-off fast radio bursts (FRBs) have been detected in the past, this is the first time multiple signals have been detected coming from the same place in space.

Suppose that it's our own echo?

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

It couldn't be our own echo.

chickelit said...

It couldn't be our own echo.

Because the cave is too big?

The Dude said...

I am old enough to recall stepping outside to watch Sputnik fly over, and being able to see it with the naked eye, along with the Milky Way.

Haven't seen the latter since the last time I camped in the High Sierra, and the former, well, so long Sputnik - for as small as you were you wrought huge changes.

chickelit said...

I haven't seen the Milky Way since I was teen camping along the Lake Superior shore with my dad.

I tried looking for it camping out in the desert recently but did not see it. The fact that my vision was impaired most nights didn't help.

ricpic said...

The deepest, and most terrifying, was this: I have said that I heard screams. (I have since learned that screaming, with hysteria, is a common reaction even to expected total eclipses.) People on all the hillsides, including, I think, myself, screamed when the black body of the moon detached from the sky and rolled over the sun. But something else was happening at that same instant, and it was this, I believe, that made us scream.

The second the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it then it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon. I have since read that this wave of shadow moves 1,800 miles an hour. Language can give no sense of this sort of speed. It was 195 miles wide. No end was in sight. You saw only the edge. It rolled at you across the land at 1,800 miles an hour, hauling darkness behind it like plague. Seeing it, and knowing it was coming straight for you, was like feeling a slug of anesthetic shoot up your arm. If you think very fast, you may have time to think, "Soon it will hit my brain." You can feel the appalling, inhuman speed of your own blood. We saw the wall of shadow coming, and screamed as it hit.

This was the universe about which we had read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds. How could anything moving so fast not crash, not veer from its orbit amok like a car out of control on a turn?

Less than two minutes later, when the sun emerged, the trailing edge of the shadow cone sped away. It coursed down our hill and raced eastward over the plain, faster than the eye could believe; it swept over the plain and dropped over the planet's rim in a twinkling. It had clobbered us, and now it roared away. We blinked in the light. It was as though an enormous, loping god in the sky had reached down and slapped the earth's face.


--Excerpt from Total Eclipse by Annie Dillard