Swans on Tea

Gigapan collection of electron-microscope images of an ant
Gigapan: Ant - Eutetramorium mocquerysi
This Gigapan is part of the NanoGigaPan project. Which is working to take high resolution images of very small things.
More at the Nano Gigapan blog
Also ant-related Mr. Ellis, Ant mega-colony takes over world
[I]t now appears that billions of Argentine ants around the [...]

The Big Picture: Recent scenes from the ISS

Pictured: Dazzling images of the Northern and Southern Lights taken from space

18 Beautiful Rainbows from Around the World
And one more from Niskayuna, which comes with a physics explanation

I never saw a purple cow;
I never hope to see one;
but I can tell you anyhow;
I’d rather see than be one!
I modified a webcam to allow IR photography, but didn’t think to take a picture like the one Matt has displayed, in which a stove’s heating element glows purple (when viewed with his camera), just [...]

Panorama of the nighttime sky over Death Valley. You can see the Milky Way as the arc in the center.

flickr: STS-125 Atlantis and Hubble Solar Transit

I was browsing the web and ran across this Gigapixel image of downtown Vancouver. I used to live there — not downtown, since my postdoc salary wouldn’t support that — but I opened it to see if I recognized the area. And I did, but not from when I lived there. [...]

Beautiful Waterfalls of Letchworth State Park
Beautiful Waterfalls of Treman State Park
Beautiful Waterfalls of Watkins Glen State Park
I may just have to visit some of these on my next trip to western NY.

Flickr: Light pollution: It’s not pretty
The preceding is sarcasm. Orem, UT is hardly a large city. This is intended to highlight the fact that light pollution is a problem everywhere, not just in cities with tens of millions of inhabitants.
Unlike some other forms of pollution, you can’t just pick up your photons when you’re [...]

A twofer. The Big Picture: Cassini’s continued mission and Earth Day 2009

On Saturday after the Open House, I stopped off at the Marine Corps memorial (depicting the flag-raising at Iwo Jima) to take some long-exposure photos. (”Long” in this case is ~5 seconds) I pass by it every day going to and from work, but had never actually stopped. Lots of tourists [...]