More about the making of the video here.

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.

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.

The course was great, split about 50-50 between lectures and laboratory work, starting with the basics of high speed photography and touching on some of the most advanced technologies that are just being released commercially. In the four days of the class we covered a wide range of useful topics:

• Camera and Setting Selection
• Lighting
• Lens Selection
• Laser Illumination
• Schlieren Imaging
• Motion Analysis Software

The 32+ course attendees were split into four groups and assigned a rather tongue in cheek project to be presented at the dinner the final evening of the course. This was a competition between teams, with prizes for the team with the “best” presentation. The point was to demonstrate some of the principles that were learned in the class, but also included points awarded for originality and entertainment. I won’t divulge details of what happened, but these were some of the funniest presentations I have ever seen. For some reason there were quite a few high speed video clips of people being hit in the head with things (including hot dogs and balls of clay). My group didn’t win the competition, but I must admit that the team that won earned every bit of it.

So many thanks to Dr. Jim Bales for the great course and the chance to have a little fun while we were at it!

* The Miracle of Science is a bar and grill about 3 blocks from MIT. Very much a tech college decor, the menu is nicely done as a periodic table on a chalkboard (I had the Rony Burger, chemical symbol “Rb”), and the bar and tables are the black lab surfaces that we all remember from chemistry lab.

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

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.

The house has some “interesting” features, like staircases that go to the ceiling, or doors that open to blank walls, or chimneys that rise though four stories just to stop short of the roof.

She was also pretty short (well under five foot tall), so some of the work in the house was obviously scaled for her size.

Other than the oddities in the house, there was beautiful hand carved woodwork, elegant gardens, and stained glass all over the place.

Also interesting was that during the 1906 earthquake, she was trapped in one of the front bedrooms, when the wall shifted and the door was bound in the frame.

The servant staff had to pry the door open, and this is supposedly the marks on that door.

After she was freed, Mrs. Winchester decided that the earthquake and damage were signs from the spirits that she had spent too much time on the front part of the house, so she boarded up the front 30 rooms, and left them as is. Today you can still see the unrepaired damage from the 1906 quake.

For more information there is always the wikipedia article, or a room by room virtual tour on a haunted whatnot site.

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.

One slow afternoon, I made it to the Deutsches Museum, by far the best science and industry museum I have ever been to. I could have spent days there.

After the conference was over, I spent my last afternoon in Munich vistitng the Olympic Park, and seeing where baby BMWs are made.

It was a nice trip, I really enjoyed Munich. Next time I’ll have to bring the family and spend some extra time.

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!

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.