Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Merriam-Webster dictionary defines pareidolia as “the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.” Dictionaries fail to mention, though, that this is the reason why we see many ordinary objects and images as way more fun than they are.
NASA’s Reconnaissance Orbiter recently snapped a photo of the Martian surface that looks like a face of a teddy bear. At least that’s how we humans see it, but what is it exactly?
Scientists recently captured a starry sky image that will make you gasp in awe. Using Dark Energy Camera in, The National Science Foundation’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) released a survey of only a portion of Milky Way, and it shows billions of stars and other celestial objects in staggering detail. It’s not only awe-inspiring and strikingly gorgeous, but it’s the largest star catalog of our home galaxy that’s ever been recorded so far.
Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata has recently been very busy onboard the International Space Station. Not only has he just done his first space walk, but he’s been using his downtime to head to the cupola viewing dome with his camera. And his images are just stunning.
Take this one of Florida’s Key West. It could almost be an abstract painting. And then there’s the aerial view of the aptly named ‘Eye of the Sahara’.
Winter has arrived here on the Earth’s Northern hemisphere, and some of you were lucky enough to have a white Christmas. But did you know that winter is also happening on Mars? With temperatures as low as -120° C, how can it not?
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recently captured stunning photos of snowy dunes on the Red Planet, giving us a glimpse of what winter looks like on our neighboring planet. They are not only visually striking, but they also provide valuable information about the Martian climate.
NASA’s Juno spacecraft has treated us with some stunning photos of Jupiter and its moons, Ganymede and Europa. But now, the mission to Jupiter has turned its cameras on sister moon Io. And in this family of moons, this is the sister that’s got a temper!
Io is the most volcanic place in the solar system, with eruptions raging all over its surface. Juno captured them in a photo, revealing the red-hot beauty and temper of Jupiter’s moon.
Photographing ink as it transforms and “dances” in water was one of my first “experiments” when I started doing photography. And to this day, I love photos like this and can’t get enough of them.
In more recent years, I got interested in astrophotography, both from the ground and from the orbit. And the latest Hubble photo somehow merged the “ink in water” look with space photography. The telescope’s close-up shot of Lagoon Nebula is like a space version of dissolved ink, and it’s as mesmerizing as it can be.
NASA recently released a stunning Hubble photo of remnants of a massive supernova. While the image seems way more peaceful than real fireworks, this colorful cloud is actually a result of something… well, far less peaceful. What is now a cloud of intricate filaments used to be a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way.
Last week, James Webb Space Telescope treated us with a magical “hourglass” of a new star formation. But good ol’ Hubble beats a new record, capturing the birth of a new star at its very earliest stage.
This dreamy, ethereal image shows a small and dense cloud of gas and dust in the constellation Serpens, called CB 130-3. Such dense cores are the birthplaces of stars, so we’re definitely looking at something extraordinary here.
It’s so exciting to see the beginning of something new and beautiful. Thanks to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, we can now see the once-hidden features of the birth of a new star. How exciting is that?
Webb’s near-infrared camera captured the protostar within the dark cloud L1527. It looks like a fiery cosmic hourglass, and it’s absolutely magical.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope brings us a pretty incredible and rare “blast from the past.” In a recent photo, the telescope captured three different moments in a supernova explosion that happened more than 11 billion years ago. In “universe years,” that’s merely childhood, which is certainly incredible. However, Hubble’s snap is special for something else too: shooting a supernova as it happens isn’t exactly an everyday sight.
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