Zoom into the night sky

 Posted by on 29 September 2009  Photography
Sep 292009
 

expo720

Wow. Armed with nothing more than a digital camera and oodles of time, photographer Serge Brunier has photographed the entire night sky. That’s every single star, northern and southern hemisphere, using a series of six-minute exposures that cumulatively add up to 120 hours of exposure time.

After stitching them together, the results is a final image that contains 40,000 x 20,000 pixels, or 800 million pixels. It is 4.42 GB in size. Then, he added data from deep-sky telescope.

Then, he stitched it all together into a flash movie that you can pan through, and zoom into.

Dive into the stars by clicking here. The site is really getting hammered right now, though, so if it doesn’t load, try back in a couple of days.

Visit the rest of the website here.

Absolutely engrossing video of a book being manufactured by hand

 Posted by on 25 September 2009  Vintage/Retro
Sep 252009
 

In 1995, John Carrera found a century-old copy of Webster’s Dictionary. Enthralled by the engraved images illustrating the dictionary, he devoted the next decade-plus to making what you might call a “new-old” edition.

First, he tracked down the original metal engravings, which had been donated to Yale University. Then, he went through the 13,000 engraved blocks, selected the ones he wanted, and printed them by hand in a book all their own. The result is the “Pictorial Webster’s.”

But that’s just skimming the story. Watch the video for an in-depth look at the level of care and craftsmanship that went into printing and binding these editions by hand — from setting the metal type to tooling the leather. It’s incredible.

I only wish I had a few thousand dollars to buy an edition for myself.

The good news is that a $35 version is also available through Chronicle Books — same stuff, just not hand-made.

(via Coudal)

Crazy free-climber pushed the limits, and paid for it

 Posted by on 31 July 2009  Modern Life
Jul 312009
 

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, where they were having a “climbing” theme day, I just learned about climber Dan Osman. That’s him, in the video above, basically running up a cliff. Intense.

But, speed-climbing didn’t always provide the rush that Osman was looking for. Instead, he started jumping from the top, using a self-designed system of ropes and pulleys to keep him free-falling right to nearly the very bottom. Intense.

So intense, that it killed him.

There’s a bit of a eulogy as a story in Outside magazine, which I found mesmerizing:

“I had a bad feeling about it,” says Daisher. “He was jumping from a different angle than we usually did, which meant he had to jump over the retrieval line, which he wasn’t even going to be able to see, as dark as it was by then. And he’d added 75 feet to the rope, which was about three times more than he usually added from one jump to the next. So he was jumping on a thousand feet of line, which meant he was going to be only about 150 feet off the ground when he stopped. I was really skeptical. I kept saying, ‘I don’t think so, Dano, I don’t like this.’”

I know it’s dangerous, and I know it’s risky, and I don’t know if I could find the courage to do it, but there’s something I find really attractive about the concept of hurtling yourself into the void.

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