Here is the 4th installment of “Images From Where? and By Who?” So we all download and save images of items, graphics and photos from the internet daily and some of the time you have no idea where to give credit besides maybe the guy that posted it first or second randomly on a blog. I ‘d like to get some answers on a few of these but also just post some interesting pieces that we come across that might have been sitting on our drives for awhile that are go to for inspiration or just found randomly on a forum with no info attached and just look great. Either way hopefully the point that gets across here is that they are inspiring in some sort of way to you as well.
The first one has to be my favorite album cover of all time but only when someone takes a photo of the vinyl sleeve and it catches this pearly yet worn look and then a slight hue of yellow over the whole thing. Who ever thought of the idea of simply just photographing this white helmet but having that mirrored visor wins an award in my book.
I remember finding this NASA illustration and it inspiring me a lot for awhile for Moodgadget material, I could of gone without the blue and orange crayon background.
I am pretty sure this “cubes on a waterfall” was an advertisement and if it was i’ll buy whatever they’re selling…especially the cubes.
I’ve seen these sort of retro-future space colony illustrations around here and there but never knew the original source until today. NASA has posted a good sized collection of full resolution scans of the original artwork here. Apparently these were part of a series of NASA studies on space colonization:
“A couple of space colony summer studies were conducted at NASA Ames in the 1970s. Colonies housing about 10,000 people were designed. A number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made. These have been converted to jpegs and are available as thumbnails, quarter page, full screen and publication quality images. There are 16 images presented below.”
This post strays a bit from the normal audio / visual fare you might be used to finding here, but whether or not you care about the science behind this film, it’s a visually stunning piece and well worth the 5 minute run time.
Magnetic Movie is an aptly titled animated short which uses animation to visualize magnetic fields. We can normally only visualize magnetic fields in large scale contexts such as our Sun’s Corona or Earth’s Polar Auroras, so it is very interesting to be able to see the small scale fields that we interact with on a day to day basis. The animations and sound design in this short are superb. Now if we could just control these things maybe we could get a Tokamak working.
Joe Rossell sent in these great shots from the Yuri’s Night show on Saturday. He used a Canon 40D and from what I’ve read, it’s a comparable model to the legendary 5D but at half the price (there’s a good discussion of this issue at the Flickr 400D group). I want to ditch my Nikon D80 sooooo bad, I really loathe that thing. Seeing filmic results like this from the 40D just makes the decision so much easier. But I feel like I should hold off since there’s been talk of the 5D’s successor being release very soon, supposedly early 2008.
The show itself was a pretty interesting event. I played in the day time but the whole thing went on until 2am (here’s a shot of the same stage later in the night, a bit different vibe). The day set was great though, a very mellow vibe and a totally great crowd. And besides all that, how often do you get to play on a billion watt sound system inside of a NASA research hangar? The only issue I had with it was the DJ format. I don’t really like when they hide you way up there behind all these counters and gear, it sort of takes away the intimacy of the show. But then again, it was an airplane hangar, so how intimate was it really going to get. I also couldn’t do visuals since it was still daylight, but not much you can do about that.
And by the way, the observant might notice the 1976 variant I’m wearing. It’s brand new and will be available at the shop in the next couple hours. I’ll be doing a proper release and newsletter tonight, but consider this an early warning.
Thanks to everyone who came out to the show tonight, it was a great time. For those of you who missed it, Yuri’s Night 2008 SF was today. It’s an annual festival celebrating the anniversary of the first man in space (Yuri Gagarin). The event is held at NASA Ames Research Center which is this huge complex of hangars and test facilities. Along with the music there are exhibits for all things science related: Robotics, Aeronautics, sustainable energy etc. Really an interesting event with a lot of interesting people.
Incidentally, I didn’t take the above photo, nor is it even of this year. It’s a shot from last year and the event has apparently grown quite a bit. I unfortunately neglected to bring my camera so all I have are some lousy iphone shots.
"From about 1956 until 1964, US aeronautics engineers and rocket scientists at the Langley Research Center developed a series of spherical satellite balloons called, awesomely enough, satelloons. Dubbed Project Echo, the 100-foot diameter aluminumized balloons were one of the inaugural projects for NASA, which was established in 1958."
