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A time lapse video of the shuttle Discovery being prepared for launch

More about the making of the video here.

One of my favorite places on the internet is a photo blog hosted by the Boston Globe called The Big Picture. Each post is a set of related images, usually something timely, often high resolution, and always breathtaking. Yesterday the collection was a series of images from Cassini, the probe we currently have orbiting Saturn. As always, the pictures are mind blowing.

Here’s one example (click for the big version on The Big Picture):

Jagged looking shadows stretch away from vertical structures of ring material created by the moon Daphnis, a bright dot (8 km, or 5 mi across) casting a thin shadow just to the left of the center of the image. The moon has an inclined orbit, and its gravitational pull perturbs the orbits of the particles of the A ring forming the Keeler Gap’s edge and sculpting the edge into waves having both horizontal (radial) and out-of-plane components. These scenes are possible only during the few months before and after Saturn’s equinox, which occurs only once in about 15 Earth years. This image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 26, 2009, at a distance of approximately 823,000 km (511,000 mi) from Daphnis.

Here’s another one showing gravitational influences of two of the moons (click to see bigger and as an animated GIF on The Big Picture):

This animated series of images of Saturn’s F Ring was acquired by Cassini on June 10, 2009. Shepherd moons Prometheus (inner) and Pandora (outer) pass by, alternately smoothing and disturbing the particles that make up the ring. Kinks, knots, wakes and disturbances are apparent in the thin ring as it rotates.

Last week, in addition to being introduced to the Miracle of Science Bar and Grill*, I had the opportunity to attend the professional short course from MIT’s Edgerton Center, High-Speed Imaging for Motion Analysis: Systems and Techniques.

Below are a few of the images captured during the course, during the bullet lab. It consisted of taking still images with a 500 nanosecond strobe of (what else?) .22 bullets going through things. These were taken in a dark room with the camera shutter open, and a microphone trigger for the strobe. I re-hosted these and others in the general photography section of this site and in addition you can find them on the Edgerton Center Site, along with others from previous years.

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Just in case the last video restored your faith in humanity too much, I give you the other end of the spectrum.

…just ask yourself “Where the Hell is Matt?”

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

I got a chance to give a symposium talk at the conference in San Jose last weekend, and during a bit of free time I found my way over to the Winchester Mystery House. This house was under continuous construction for 38 years, under the daily direction of Sarah Winchester, who supposedly built the additions to the house to appease some spirits that were haunting her. In my opinion, a lot of the odd construction could be the building of additions without any sort of master plan, but thats just me. Not really one that gets excited by ghost stories, I was more interested in the construction of this house, the architecture, and the chance to take some interesting photographs.

The story behind the houses starts on the other side of the country in Connecticut. After her daughter and husband died, Mrs. Winchester consulted a psychic of some sort that told her the family was cursed, and she was haunted but the souls of all the people that had been killed by Winchester firearms. She was ‘drawn west’ so she went to San Jose, bought an six room farm house and started construction in 1884. This construction went on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for 38 years until her death at the age of 83 in 1922. The day she died the workmen stopped. All told she spend over $5 million on construction, funded by the $20 million in cash and the $1000 per day she earned from half ownership in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company she inherited from her husband at his death.

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As mentioned in the Cliff’s notes version regarding April, I spent a few days in Munich last month. It was part of the 10th International Conference on Hyperthermic Oncology. The trip was quick (yay for direct flights), and unfortunately the family didn’t get to join me. I did get to present a poster of one of the measurement tools we are using in my dissertation research, so that was a plus.

The conference venue was a hospital that was located about six or seven kilometers from the hotel, so I quickly learned the layout of the subway system in order to get back and forth each day. The hotel was close to the center of town, so there was a chance to see the Rathaus and wander around downtown each night.

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I got the chance to go downtown and take some pictures last week. I don’t have a lot of experience with night photography, so the learning curve was pretty steep. Some things worked, but a lot of them didn’t.

The top image of the downtown skyline and the one below of the pedestrian bridge used the High Dynamic Range technique, and turned out pretty well.

One lesson learned: even if the fence you are shooting though is way out of your depth of field, it shows up in those really long exposures!

There are a couple is one more in the gallery under general photography.

All in all it was fun, and I learned a lot, so I will have to try my hand at it again in the near future!

For those with clear skies tomorrow night, there will be a total lunar eclipse at 8:01 MST. It should last about 50 minutes or so, and will be visible in North and South America, Europe and Africa. The moon won’t disappear, but will turn red in color due to the light coming off the Earth’s atmosphere. Check it out if you can, next one is December 2010!

If I had an observatory at my house, I would be out there all the time. If I had big telescopes at my house, you would have to pry me away with a crowbar. People would be sick of hearing me talk about the stars and planets, and they would run and hide every time I got out the pictures.

But alas, it is not so for everyone.

As reported in the Independent, Pope Benedict XVI is moving the observatory off the grounds of his summer residence.

Science is to make way for diplomacy at the Pope’s summer residence, with the dismantling of the astronomical observatory that has been part of Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome, for more than 75 years. The Pope needs more room to receive diplomats so the telescopes have to go.

Moving it to make more room to receive diplomats? I think the stars would be more interesting, but nobody died and made me Pope.