During a 2001 launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, NASA photographer Pat McCracken captured this amazing photograph of the shuttle’s smoke plume casting a shadow across the full moon rising in the horizon.
[...] the Sun, Earth, Moon, and rocket were all properly aligned for this photogenic coincidence. First, for the space shuttle’s plume to cast a long shadow, the time of day must be either near sunrise or sunset. Only then will the shadow be its longest and extend all the way to the horizon. Finally, during a Full Moon, the Sun and Moon are on opposite sides of the sky. Just after sunset, for example, the Sun is slightly below the horizon, and, in the other direction, the Moon is slightly above the horizon. Therefore, as Atlantis blasted off, just after sunset, its shadow projected away from the Sun toward the opposite horizon, where the Full Moon just happened to be. [#]
Brazilian gadget site ZTOP recently attended a press event during which Fujifilm showed another roadmap for its X Series lineup. We’ve already reported that the company is planning to announce an interchangeable lens camera (hopefully with the X100′s retro style) in early 2012, but this new roadmap narrows down the launch date to February 2012. We’ll likely see the camera announced before then and showed off at CES 2012 in January.
500px, quickly becoming known as the “Flickr for artsy photographers”, has released a new iPad app designed to deliver a beautiful photo viewing experience. In just a few days the app has already risen into the top 5 free photo apps in the app store, and now serves half of all traffic seen by 500px. GigaOM reports that users spend an average of 35 minutes per visit, viewing 80 photographs in the process.
The website has also been experiencing incredible growth. Traffic has grown over the past year by more than 20x to 3.4 million visitors per month, and continues to grow at 30% month over month. The service — which has 12 employees — currently stores 2.5 million photographs.
If you’re a Flickr loyalist that hasn’t jumped ship for competing services, Flickr is rewarding you with a couple new tools for sharing your photos. Today the company announced an official app for Android and a new photo-sharing feature called Photo Sessions. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s the first episode of Shutterbugs, the new web series we mentioned a couple weeks ago that’s geared towards photo enthusiasts. Each episode is pretty short — this one is just 3.5 minutes long — and a new one will be released every Tuesday. You can also follow the show by subscribing to the channel through YouTube.
Everpix is a new company that wants to make your entire photo collection — both online and offline — accessible from anywhere through the cloud. Introduced yesterday at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 conference, the service will come as a desktop client that monitors folders on your computer and photo sharing accounts on the Internet. Whenever you add new photographs, they’re automatically beamed to the cloud (i.e. Everpix servers), allowing images created using many different devices and stored in many different places to be available in one central location. Even photos emailed to your through Gmail can be picked up and back up by the service. Read the rest of this entry »
Nikon did launch a new Coolpix camera today — eight of them, in fact — but the rumored “Coolpix Pro” mirrorless camera was nowhere to be found. The bevy of compact cameras hits store shelves next month, and includes the P7100 — a more polished successor to the P7000 announced around this time last year, and Nikon’s answer to Canon’s G-series line of prosumer compact cameras. The 10.1MP camera features a tilting 3-inch LCD screen on the back, manual controls, 720p video, and RAW capabilities. It’ll be priced at $500. Read the rest of this entry »
Musician Chris Bray was 13-years-old when he and his father attended the first ever launch of NASA’s Space Shuttle program on April 12th, 1981. His mother snapped a photograph of the two standing ready with binoculars and a Super 8 camera. Last Friday, Bray (now 44) and his father (now nearly 70) were also in attendance at the final launch of the Shuttle program, and decided to recreate the photo they had taken together 30 years earlier.
Here’s a good example of when HDR photography is useful: NASA created this image of the Space Shuttle Endeavour lifting off for the final time by combining six separate photographs.
Each image was taken at a different exposure setting, then composited to balance the brightness of the rocket engine output with the regular daylight levels at which the orbiter can be seen. The processing software digitally removes pure black or pure white pixels from one image and replaces them with the most detailed pixel option from the five other images. This technique can help visualize debris falling during a launch or support research involving intense light sources like rocket engines, plasma experiments and hypersonic vehicle engines. [#]
After Space Shuttle Endeavour launched on its final mission, a woman named Stefanie Gordon snapped a photograph of it from her Delta airlines seat using her iPhone, sharing it with friends and family through TwitPic. Though it quickly went viral, and was shared all over the media, Gordon was only paid by five media organizations for licensing rights to the photo. The Red Tape blog over on MSNBC wrote a great post a couple days ago bringing the issue of copyright infringement to the public’s attention:
In a world where social media users, bloggers and even some professional journalists are increasingly comfortable simply copying the work of others and republishing it, can intellectual property rights survive? Can original content survive? And what should the world do when an amateur photographer takes a newsworthy photo and shares it on a social network?
We didn’t share Gordon’s photo here on PetaPixel because we never got her permission to do so (she never responded to our requests). Luckily for us, NASA just published this awesome (non-copyrighted) photograph of the launch that you can freely share and republish.
