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November 6, 2009

Telescope camera mod

Craig Smith sent us these pics and note:

My telescope is low end in the scope-world, a 60mm refractor. But I discovered the eyepiece is the same size as my digital camera telephoto lens. My digital camera is low end in the camera world, too, a 3.2MP. But put them together with a custom PVC sleeve aligning lens-to-eyepiece, and I'm getting awesome moon shots. Here is the moon on 11/5/09. I added a camera support arm also, a quick adjustment of the tripod leg's wing nut, and I'm all aligned to photograph the skies.

Martian landscapes

Universal Site Graphics Blogs Bigpicture Mars 11 06 M04 43790925

Universal Site Graphics Blogs Bigpicture Mars 11 06 M11 02211420

Martian landscapes - The Big Picture @ Boston.com via Waxy.

Since 2006, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting Mars, currently circling approximately 300 km (187 mi) above the Martian surface. On board the MRO is HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, which has been photographing the planet for several years now at resolutions as fine as mere inches per pixel. Collected here is a group of images from HiRISE over the past few years, in either false color or grayscale, showing intricate details of landscapes both familiar and alien, from the surface of our neighboring planet, Mars. I invite you to take your time looking through these, imagining the settings - very cold, dry and distant, yet real. (35 photos total)

November 3, 2009

All-Sky Milky Way Panorama 2.0

Axel.Mellinger Mwpan2 Aitoff 1200X600
Stunning...

Between October 2007 and August 2009, a new digital all-sky mosaic image was assembled from more than 3000 individual CCD frames. Using an SBIG STL-11000 camera, 70 fields (each covering 40° × 27°) were imaged from dark-sky locations in South Africa, Texas and Michigan. In order to increase the dynamic range beyond the 16 bits of the camera's analog-to-digital converter (of which approx. 12 bits provide data above the noise level), three different exposure times (240 s, 15 s and 0.5 s) were used. Five frames were taken for each exposure time and filter setting. The fields were photometrically calibrated using standard catalog stars and sky background data from the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes. The new panorama has an image scale of 36 arcsec/pixel (approx. 3× the resolution of the old, film-based mosaic), a limiting magnitude of approx. 14 mag and an 18 bit dynamic range. At full resolution and bit depth, it is a 648 MPixel, 7.7 GByte FITS cube. Unlike the old image, the new panorama was carefully calibrated to preserve the large-scale star and dust clouds.

October 23, 2009

Awesome collection of DIY video-glitch hardware

The "tools" section of media artist Karl Klomp's website documents an impressive amount of bent, hacked and homebrew hardware for video manipulation. Devices such as the Failter (seen above)series go through a number of incarnations while Karl experiments with different hardware and uncovers its glitch-ability. The retro-simple feel of the enclosures give give it all a nicely 'scientific' almost medical feel. Be sure to check out his device gallery/ project list for more examples. Thanks to Becky for pointing this one out!

October 22, 2009

Automatic image index-maker software

matt_mets_things_in_my_kitchen (Custom).jpg

Our own Matt Mets put me onto this program called Montage from the open-source ImageMagick suite. Shown above is Matt's image "Things in my kitchen," and here is the command line to Montage that produced it:

montage +frame +shadow +label -tile 10x8 -borderwidth 1 -background white -bordercolor white -geometry 200x133 *.jpg stuff.jpg

As you can see, Montage takes all the work out of combining a bunch of individual images into an array of images, dealing automatically with all the resizing, cropping, arranging, and/or labeling headaches automatically.

Below is my own experiment with the software, "A visual guide to necklines," which I made because I never have any idea how to describe women's clothes.

Montage arrayed the images, added drop shadows, and labeled them based on their file names automatically. The only real work involved was tracking down the images online and saving them as appropriately-named files, but it wouldn't be hard to write a script to do that, either. Then one could conceivably go from a typed list of nouns to a complete visual index of those nouns completely automatically.

October 16, 2009

Street View's embedded videos

Phil Clandillon has a cool new video project featuring Google Earth mashups with panoramic images of specific locations relating to the background of the music on the Editors' new album.

After the break is more background info.

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October 13, 2009

Giant hand torments city goers

Here's an excellent use for a giant LED billboard: a crazy augmented reality installation. The appropriately titled Hands From Above was made by artist Chris O'Shea. Want to create your own? You might run into trouble finding such a nice billboard to use, however the programming environments he used- openFrameworks and openCV - are both freely available. His source code doesn't seem to be available though, unfortunately. [via interactive architecture]

October 12, 2009

Fantasy cartography forum

Cartographer's Guild is a thriving online community for folks who are interested in making maps of places that do not exist. There are some really beautiful graphics to be found, particularly, in their Cartographer's Choice forum. Shown at the top of the post is Sapiento's Post Apocalyptic Amerika, and immediately above is töff's Map of Ceres: 16th Millenium.

Photoshop on the iPhone

Adobe has released a version of their Photoshop.com Mobile app for the iPhone. It's not the full-featured professional software known for it's reality altering effects, but rather a slimmed-down version compatible with their photoshop.com service. You'll have the ability to perform basic operations on your images like crop, rotate, and flip. You'll also be able to do basic color correction and apply simple filters and effects.

After making personalized edits, users can upload photos from their iPhone to their Photoshop.com account to view and retrieve their images at a later time from any Internet-connected computer. In addition, Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone provides the ultimate digital photo wallet, giving users access to their entire Photoshop.com library directly from their iPhone.

October 10, 2009

Bullet impacts at 1,000,000 frames per second

I'm not entirely sure who made this video. I have this strange intuition it might be someone named "Werner Mehl," and that the video might be copyright 2009, and....somehow, that Werner's website is probably www.kurzzeit.com. Isn't it weird how sometimes stuff just comes to you?

October 8, 2009

"Golem," by Randis Albion

I really love this illustration by Randis Albion (Andre Weiss) of brainy kids summoning a tectonic entity made of toys. It's the details that make Albion's work: The nervous look of the ravens outside the window, the fact that the wizard-child is in a wheelchair. His website is NSFW by some folks' standards, I suppose, but well worth the click.

Twins from "The Shining" projection

Is this rightly called a "hologram?" Either way, it's pretty sweet. David Hartig of Santa Clara took a short video clip of his daughter in creepy makeup and an Alice-in-Wonderland costume, mirrored her image, and projected it onto some cardboard cutouts draped in muslin. "Come and play with us, Danny...."

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

October 1, 2009

Bokode at Home

Fascinated by MIT's Bokode data tag system, maker Matthew Borgatti decided to recreate the effect at home using easy to find materials.

Bokode is a method MIT developed for tucking information (such as barcodes, images, etc. in microprint) into a tiny but easily visible package. It leverages the bokeh effect to show off the information on the microprint to anyone pointing a camera at the Bokode unit and defocussing. If you've ever taken a photo with a distant city in the background and noticed the city lights turning into little circular blobs when out of focus you've seen the bokeh effect.

If you'd like to follow along at home, Matthew's site has the diagrams, laser cutter templates, sample patterns, and practical advice you'll need to get started experimenting with your very own Bokode-like system.

[gracias, Matthew!]

September 20, 2009

Taking photos of bats...

How To Photograph A Bat 02
How To Photograph A Bat 04
Wonderful bat gallery and how the photos are taken!

September 18, 2009

Processing script makes Mona's eyes move

Bitartist has written and posted a Processing script that causes the eyes of an onscreen portrait to follow your face as you move past a camera. Primo haunted house material. Thanks man!

September 16, 2009

Projection-mapped mansion

Motion graphics studio DarkroomTV created some great eye candy at a recent festival -

We got invited along to do some video mapping projections at a secret festival in the North East of England. The theme and logo of the party was the heart. We spent a couple of weeks in the studio creating the show which opened the party.

[via Geekologie]

Vintage viewfinder photo adapter

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Flickr member victorf built this simple adapter to capture the view from a Kodak Duaflex II with his digital camera. Check out some of the results in his Through the viewfinder photoset.

September 15, 2009

Halloween mirror in Processing

Instructables user Lighttamer presents this awesome software to turn your monitor and webcam into an augmented-reality scary face machine. Masks, which you can design, are overlaid on human faces in the video feed in real time.

Timelapse history of the sky

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Ken Murphy is capturing a year's worth of timelapse sequences from atop San Francisco's exploratorium - seen above is the first 42 days of his project -

The earliest day is in the upper left, and consecutive days follow left to right, then down, with the most recent day in the lower right. It starts a little before sunrise, so it's dark for the first few seconds:
[...]
Keep in mind that all of the days are synchronized, so at any given moment, you're looking at the sky at the exact same time of day for each of the panels. The cascading effect at sunrise and sunset is caused by the variations in day length.

The collective effect of sunset is quite cinematic - read more on MurphLab.

September 1, 2009

Star Wars: West Coast defense

The reason Photoshop was invented? I think yes.

AT-ST patrols Cannon Beach, Oregon, at sunset. Evidently the Empire is cracking down on the outlying systems.

Mike Horn made this series of still images over a weekend after several people asked for hi-res wallpapers from his videos Death Star Over San Francisco and Death Star Destroys Enterprise. He Photoshopped them from personal photos and Star Wars images off Wookieepedia.

Flickr set here, suitable for framing.

San Francisco scout trooper on lunch break on the Embarcadero, and in this joint you can bet he downed a few Buds with that burger. Ready to ride.

These stormtroopers are real -- they're members of the 501st Legion Golden Gate Garrison who generously volunteered to be in Horn's video Death Star Destroys Enterprise, shot on location in the old World War II artillery batteries in the Marin Headlands north of San Francisco.

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