First discovered by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s, NASA has recently released new images of the mysterious hexagon-shaped storm on Saturn’s northern pole. Taken with their Cassini Spacecraft, visible light images like this were not originally possible when Cassini arrived at Saturn back in 2004 due to the entire northern hemisphere being in winter solstice.
Size
The hexagon measures 25,000 km (15,500 mi) across, with each side being 13,800 km (8,600 mi) long. As the above image demonstrates, it’s wide enough to fit nearly four earth’s inside of it.
Composition
The hexagonal ring itself is created by a jet stream, while the center contains a spiralling vortex of clouds. Scientists say that the storm reaches speeds up to 354 km/h (220 mph).
Explanation?
In short, we can’t figure it out. Namely, scientists don’t currently understand where the storm obtains and expels its energy, or how/why it has stayed in such an organized shape for so long.
You can read more about this hexagonal goodness here and view more images here.
Have you ever wanted to hear Radiohead on a $3.99 AM only clock radio speaker? well maybe wait around and just buy the wood cut version or just download the vector of it for your 3D printer.
Here’s Joy Division as well if you just couldn’t get enough of that Radiohead video.
The Verge has posted an interview with Apple product photographer Peter Belanger. Amazing how much work goes into the process. As evidenced by this video, there’s a lot more than straight up photography going on, which is to be expected. Was a little surprised they went as far as to accentuate the chrome on the bezel but I supposed it’s par for the course with this sort of thing.
Overall I was a little underwhelmed with the process. I would have assumed Apple did this all in-house in some space that looked like a set from 2001 with airlocks and cleanroom suits.
Here’s the video Charles Bergquist and Scott worked on for Ascension. If you have seen the live show in the past year you’ll recognize some of the shots.
We’ve only supported/shared a handful of Kickstarter projects in the past, I always want to do more but its best wait for some of the best ones or ones that friends do that catch our eyes. This one by Matthew Waldman from Nooka is a pretty great idea since I see soo much coffee grounds go in the trash and a compost in an office environment isn’t the best always. I’ll let the video do the talking, support below.
Since Beacon has toured with Tycho they have found themselves some proper exposure from singing live with Sarah Barthel from Phantogram to hitting the road with How To Dress Well. The duo will hopefully be all over the states and EU this summer and fall, until then just enjoy the stream above.
Thomas Mullarney and Jacob Gossett, aka Brooklyn duo Beacon, introduced themselves to the world with the No Body and For Now EPs, both released last year on Ghostly International. The EPs were united by minimalist, R&B-influenced instrumentation, and also by a lyrical theme, with both serving as meditations on the darkness that underpins the most intense of human emotions: love.
The duo’s debut album The Ways We Separate both consolidates and develops these ideas. The album focuses, as the title suggests, on the idea of separation — both within the context of relationships and in a more intimate, psychological sense. As Mullarney explains, “The narrative contained inside The Ways We Separate deals with two kinds of separation: one where two entities grow apart, and the other where we grow apart from ourselves. Over the course of a relationship, the two sometimes happen together, one being the result of the other.”
Desires, passions and regrets are central to the songs on The Ways We Separate, which take a variety of perspectives to construct a nuanced reflection on the album’s central theme. ‘Between the Waves’ draws a clever analogy between relationships and soundwaves falling out of phase: “I know all the ways we separate/ Where we start to fade at different frequencies.” ‘Overseer’ catalogues a parting of the ways with discomfiting clarity: “Isn’t it fine?/ Taking it slow?/ Watching you watch me walk out your door.” And album closer ‘Split in Two’ explores how the extremes of love and loss can take you far away from being the person you thought you were, making explicit the connection between the two ideas of separation: “What I’d do for you?”, sings Thomas Mullarney, “Split myself in half/ Divided into two.”
Musically, The Ways We Separate finds Beacon working with a richer sonic palette than ever before —as Gossett says, “The production on this album is much more expansive than anything we’ve done thus far. We spent a lot of time exploring new gear and experimenting with how to pull a wide range of sound out of various instruments. Some of the key sonics that shaped this LP are analogue synthesis, lots of heavily processed guitar work, and vocal layering/processing.” While the abiding mood remains that of late-night introspection, the production draws from elements of hip hop and a wide gamut of electronic music, marrying intricate beats and subtle textures to honeyed pop melodies that belie the album’s conceptual depth. Rarely has bleakness sounded so pretty — this is a record that’s deceptively, compellingly beautiful, an exploration of a place both discomfiting and darkly seductive.
I know we still have a Boards Of Canada album to hear, I know the new Daft Punk has Panda Bear on it, I also know that I can’t stop listening to this track since we originally posted it.
Situated in the Atacama Desert, northern Chile, at 2,635m above sea level exists the Paranal Observatory. Operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the site contains mankind’s most advanced optical instrument, the Very Large Telescope (VLT), as well as a number of other state-of-the-art auxiliary and survey telescopes – most notably the VLT Survey Telescope and VISTA.
The VLT itself is comprised of four unit telescopes, which in 2011 gained the ability to work together to create the VLT Interferometer; an instrument that allows astronomers to see details up to 25 times greater than the individual telescopes can alone. Needless to say, the results offer a staggeringly beautiful view of our cosmos.
You can view many more Paranal Observatory and ESO images on the ESO website. A short film comprised of time lapses from the Paranal Observatory was also released last year. This is embedded below. Fullscreen that mother.
