I originally set out this blog to be of things I generally found cool, but I’m such a self-centered ass that it turned entirely into a photoblog. One thing in paticular I wanted to cover was everything and anything to do with space. Space as you all know, is an incredibly amazing place that throws up things that manage to humble me on a daily basis. GRBs, photos of extrasolar planets, and even videos of Lady Sun.

Or a photo of Io. I think I’ve ranted about this moon before. I do know that some of my favourite photos from the Jupiter system is of this moon, if only because it’s such a dynamic, exotic and entirely lethal place. Half the crap in Jupiter’s radiation belts was spewed forth from it’s volcanoes. It’s features have visibly changed between the Voyager missions and New Horizon’s flyby last month. The surface is entirely covered with what’s basically a metre-thick layer of sulphur that gives the moon it’s distinctive colour. Eruptions from Pele, Loki and Tvashtar can bee seen from Earth.

But back to the photo at hand. This was snapped by New Horizons from 2.3 million kilometres, while travelling at 82,800 km/h. What’s more amazing is that this was by a semi-autonomous probe whose trajectory was precisely mapped several years about by a bunch of geeks sitting in a room. If that’s not “extreme photography,” I’d like to know what is, seeing as it’s very akin to flying by Earth from ten times the distance to the moon and photographing Europe with such detail that you can pick out individual cities:

(Stolen from APoD)

I think it’s an amazing picture. Oh for sure it’s as processed as most photos are, the original is a little hazy. But it doesn’t change the fact that this probe sent back this image while under those conditions.

Keep up the eye candy, NASA.

A better attempt

Taken facing due east, up is to the right. This is looking toward the milky way by way of Cygnus. I think personally that I’ve done a better job of processing it this time, better colours and better contrast to make the dust clouds stand out.

I adjusted the white balance for tungsten in Lightroom and then played with levels, curves and the brightness/contrast tools in Photopshop for what I think is a much nicer finish (much more naturally coloured) than my last try at the milky way. Thanks go to Stellarium for correcting me on the constellations and stars.

I’m badly waiting for my camera to come back from repair so I can go and try out these kind of shots again.

I don’t want to leave Mariah and Caira. Really don’t want to, but I don’t have much choice in the matter as I have to go back home to finish the paperwork for my visa. Bleh.

So I spent two months in the US and I have to say it has its upsides and its downsides and for lack of anything better to do (departures is boring) I may as well list them:

Television: 300 channels, nothing to watch. Everything good is cut to shreds by their strange censorship criteria - horrible, graphic violence is perfect acceptable. The word “hell” is bleeped out and no show of human flesh is allowed. Go watch This Film Is Not Yet Rated. for an idea on America’s weird notions of “good taste.”