Welcome to winter in the northern hemisphere.
Category Archives: Photos
The Year in Pixels
The Big Picture: The Year in Pictures . Part 1, part 2, part 3.
There are a few “what happens next is obvious” pictures in there, such as the (imminent) plane crash and bike crash (16 and 21, respectively, in part 2), or “just the right moment” pictures, which might be a little easier to capture in the digital age, because “film” is almost unlimited and free. You are able to take many pictures in rapid succession, and are more limited by battery capacity than how much film/storage you can carry, so grabbing just the right moment is a little easier. That doesn’t diminish the awesome nature of each shot, though. It just allows us to see more of them.
The Other Java Jive
Photographer Olivier Grunewald has recently made several trips into the sulfur mine in the crater of the Kawah Ijen volcano in East Java, Indonesia, bringing with him equipment to capture surreal images lit by moonlight, torches, and the blue flames of burning molten sulfur. Covered last year in the Big Picture (in daylight), the miners of the 2,600 meter tall (8,660ft) Kawah Ijen volcano trek up to the crater, then down to the shore of a 200-meter-deep crater lake of sulfuric acid, where they retrieve heavy chunks of pure sulfur to carry back to a weighing station. Mr. Grunewald has been kind enough to share with us the following other-worldly photos of these men as they do their hazardous work under the light of the moon.
Burning liquid sulfur. Wow.
Simply the Best
Best Space Pictures of 2010: Odd Aurora, Ring of Fire, More
Bonus: photos from the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2010 contest
National Geographic's Photography Contest 2010
National Geographic’s Photography Contest 2010
National Geographic is once again holding their annual Photo Contest, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 30th. For the past eight weeks, they have been gathering and presenting galleries of submissions, encouraging readers to rate them as well. National Geographic was again kind enough to let me choose some of their entries from 2010 for display here on The Big Picture. Collected below are 47 images from the three categories of People, Places and Nature. Captions were written by the individual photographers.
Hey Bartender
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Let's Get Small
2010 winners of Nikon’s Small World photomicography competition
Read, Aim, Fire!
The Big Picture: The National Ignition facility
“Creating a miniature star on Earth” is the goal of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), home to the world’s largest and highest-energy laser in Livermore, California. On September 29th, 2010, the NIF completed its first integrated ignition experiment, where it focused its 192 lasers on a small cylinder housing a tiny frozen capsule containing hydrogen fuel, briefly bombarding it with 1 megajoule of laser energy. The experiment was the latest in a series of tests leading to a hoped-for “ignition”, where the nuclei of the atoms of the fuel inside the target capsule are made to fuse together releasing tremendous energy – potentially more energy than was put in to start the initial reaction, becoming a valuable power source. The NIF has cost over $3.5 billion since 1997 and is a part of the federally funded Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Scientists at NIF say they hope to achieve fusion by 2012.
Trick or Trout
Best SEM of an Ant with a Microchip in its Mandibles You'll See This Week
And other neat pictures. Feeling chipper, the little wood ant caught bringing science to life