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 - 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)

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.

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!

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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!]

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Because of its affordable price and speedy framerates, Sony's PS3 Eye camera has become a popular choice for hacking by interactive video experimentalists. Creat Digital Motion posted a nice feature on modding the device, highlighting several video tutorials by Peau Productions for IR filtration and even adding a custom enclosure. Read the full article over at CDM.

A group from the University of Tokyo have developed a method for adding tangibility to holograms using focussed ultrasonic waves -

This project adds tactile feedback to the hovering image in 3D free space. Tactile sensation requires contact with objects, but including a stimulator in the work space dilutes the appearance of holographic images. The Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display solves this problem by producing tactile sensation on a user's hand without any direct contact and without diluting the quality of the holographic projection.

DAAP industrial design student Kyle A Koch designed and fabricated this useful flat pack copy stand for the iPhone. It will copy a standard letter-sized sheet with reasonable fidelity.

[via crave]

My post last week about shadowgraphy and Schlieren photography generated a lot of enthusiastic responses and not a few requests for a more detailed tutorial. Among the comments was one by Ian Smith, who has a great page here describing his own Schlieren photography set-up. (While you're there, take a moment to appreciate the fact that Ian's URL is "www.ian.org"....think he's been around the 'net awhile?) Thanks again, Ian!

I'm very much digging these classic visual effects created by animation pioneer John Whitney using parts from an anti-aircraft gunsight. YouTuber crystalsculpture2 gives more info -

John Whitney's demo reel of work created with his analog computer/film camera magic machine he built from a WWII anti-aircraft gun sight. Also Whitney and the techniques he developed with this machine were what inspired Douglas Trumbull (special fx wizard) to use the slit scan technique on 2001: A Space Odyssey

Looking to build a motorized POV display, UncleBone made use of a certain rotary mechanism he already had on hand -

Seeing so many persistence of vision ideas on the web was too tempting not to try one. After considering several different motors to drive a display, a ceiling fan seemed to run at just the right speed, is out of the way, and very quiet compared with alternatives. With a micro controller based on the Arduino, this project provided plenty of both software and hardware learning and besides, the kids were involved throughout...

In the Maker Shed:

MiniPOV kit

The New York Times has an awesome slideshow of shadowgrams and Schlieren photographs, created by engineering professor Gary Settles, which accompany a 2008 article about his work at Penn State's Gas Dynamics Lab. The method, which can produce fantastic visualizations of fluid flow in turbulent systems, is amazingly simple. I am surprised there aren't more hobbyists doing it.

Cartermarquis writes:

The Snorricam, named after Einar Snorri and Eiour Snorri,or the "Snorri Brothers", is a body mount for a camera which is used to create an interesting point of view, which can be seen in such movies as I Am Legend, Slumdog Millionaire, and The Hangover. I work for a small video production company, and with much enthusiasm from my boss, I designed and built my own version of the Snorricam, which is very adjustable and versatile. For about $30 in parts, and around a day of labor, You can have yourself an adjustable Snorricam of your own!

As a woman, I can see room for improvement in the chest plate design, but otherwise this looks really cool!

I really like the inexpensive gimbal support developed by William over at YB2nornal for his $15 steadicam project. I may bogart it for a forthcoming Make: Project. Via Hack a day.

From the pages of MAKE:

Johnny Lee showed us how to build a $14 Video Camera Stabilizer way back in MAKE 01.

More than two decades ago, Fujifilm was one of the first camera manufacturers to see the future of photography was digital. In 1988, the Japanese imaging giant developed the world's first fully digital still camera; 10 years ago Fujifilm held 30% of the digicam market. But that dominant position proved difficult to defend against competitors such as Nikon, Olympus and Canon. Today, Fujifilm is one of the industry's also-rans, with just a 6.7% market share.

There's one way to get back into the game: invent new rules. That's just what Fujifilm plans to do later this year when it unveils the world's first 3-D digital camera for consumers. The company hopes that its groundbreaking new gadget -- tentatively named the FinePix Real 3D System -- will allow it to leapfrog the competition by bringing 3-D capabilities to the masses, at the same time putting a little buzz back into the business of taking snapshots.

....In the past, special viewing accessories such as 3-D glasses or stereoscopes were needed for this to work. Not so with Fujifilm's system, which offers two viewing options. One is a 3-D digital picture frame -- an eight-inch (20 cm) LCD screen that directs the dual images to the left and right eyes, creating the 3-D effect. The other option is 3-D prints, which are made with a clear plastic overlay that acts as a kind of 3-D lens. Fujifilm plans to launch an online service that will make 3-D prints for consumers.

Some additional tech details on their press site. Camera will be about $600 and the 3D prints are $5 a pop - I'm sure we'll be able to make our own prints, use our own screens and save some $. And of course, you can make your own 3D cameras and images right now...

More:

• HOW TO - Make a simple DIY stereoscopic microscope.
• 3D Video viewing moded stereoscope.
• Make - Volume 06 - 3D Photography (Page 143).
• 3D images of Maker Faire.
• Make - Volume 14 - Homebrew Digital 3D Movies (Page 51).