Unstructured Eruption

Here's a rather specatular orbital photo taken of the Aleutian Islands' Cleveland Volcano taken for NASA's Earth Observatory. Click here for a larger image.

Google Earth Oddities

Google Earth is one of those killer apps that you just can't put down. The first thing you do with it, of course, is to find your home and then other places that are significant to you, such as your old high school. Eventually, though, you find yourself just wandering the globe as a virtual eye-in-the-sky tourist looking for interesting things and oddities.

This is a slide show of some of the more curious things that people have found including a jet fighter that's apparently been parked in a residential neighborhood, a really huge bunny rabbit, and a picture of Oprah Winfrey embossed into a corn field.

Nature, Black and White in Tooth and Claw

A very cool collection of black and white nature photographs by Nick Brandt.

Unstructured Awwwwww!

Warning: cute bomb!

Unstructured Aurora Borealis

This gorgeous photograph of the aurora borealis was taken from low Earth orbit. Click on the picture for a much larger version.

Photonic Graffiti

Making art with a source of light and a long exposure has a respectable lineage. Even Pablo Picasso was known to partake of the format.

Here is a stunning collection of "graffiti" that uses this technique.

Unstructured Apollo

Has anyone ever noticed the irony of naming the moon landing program after a sun god? Really, shouldn't it have been the Selene program? I blame the Patriarchy.

In any case, all the photos taken during the Apollo program are being digitally scanned in ultra-high resolution and being made available to the public. This is great news for space geeks, everywhere.

Unstructured Time Lapse

Human beings live in such a narrow slice of time. It's often difficult for us to step out of out temporal frames, which is why I think that time lapse photography is such a fascinating thing to us. The first time you really see that a plant is a living, animate thing is a moment of epiphany.

A particularly striking example of this phenomenon can be found in a photo essay of the family of Diego Goldberg. The Goldbergs have made a ritual of taking a yearly photo of each of their members. The site has arranged the photos into a vertical chronology that really gives you the sense of the passage of years.